The Joe Rogan Experience - #1130 - Adam Frank

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Adam Frank is a physicist, astronomer, and writer. His scientific research has focused on computational astrophysics with an emphasis on star formation and late stages of stellar evolution. His new book "Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth" is available now on Amazon.

Five, four, three, two, one. Boom. Boom. Adam, what's up, man? How you doing? It's good to be here today. It's good to be here, too, with you and to talk. Whoa.

I'm already knocking shit over. Can't be trusted. Your book, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. Yeah, all about it. That's deep shit, man. Just the title alone, you're like, whoa. I love aliens. Everybody loves aliens.

Everybody does, but what are your thoughts on actual aliens and whether or not they've ever visited here? Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, sort of two things. So, first of all. We should tell everybody you have a background in science. I do. I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. I run a research group that studies like stars and planets.

So you're not a crazy person I brought on here. No, no, no. I'm a card carrying scientist. I got my card and everything. So, yeah, I've been doing research on, you know, astronomy, astrophysics for a long time. But I also do all this popular writing like for NPR, New York Times. And the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction.

I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid. But also I do a lot of work on climate change. And so I deal with a lot of climate change denial. And what I realized was that there's this way we talk about it that completely forgets about the fact that we're probably not the first. And that led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book you know including one paper that we did that showed uh that the odds

that were the only time it's ever happened only you know the only civilization in the entire history of the universe uh the only way that that could be true is if uh the odds per planet are one in 10 billion trillion right that's That's pretty low, right? So, you know, the odds of anything being one in 10 billion trillion, that's pretty freaking low. So it's probably happened before, you know? There's been other civilizations before ours. And once you realize that, man, that is like, you know, it changes everything about how we think about ourselves, you know, and what's happening to us right now. So other civilizations before ours that have

fucked things up. Well, that's kind of the premise, right? So that's what, when you look at climate change, right? Basically what it is, is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into work, right? New York City, right? You sit over and you look at Manhattan, you're like, holy shit, right? There's all this energy flowing into it. And then there's all this work being done, you know, to keep everything moving. And, you know, there's no way not to have an impact. If you build a world girdling civilization, which, you know, that's what a civilization is, there's going to be impact. So the whole point of my doing this book was to start looking at ourselves as just one of, you know, we're not alone. We're not the only time this has ever happened. Doesn't mean anybody's around now. Like that's a different question.

But the idea that like, it's never happened before it meaning like, you know, you know, civilization, what's happening around us, like this machinery and everything that, um, you know, that just in the new world of what we understand about planets and shit, that is just like, you know, it's not tenable anymore. We got to wake up. The idea that some civilization has to be the first one. That's, that's what the what – the only way you could ever think that we're the only ones is that some civilization has to be the first one, even in a universe that's infinite. Yeah. It has to happen one time.

Right. But the idea is, are the conditions ideal in a trillion different spots all over the infinite spans of the universe. Yeah. And that's the thing, right? So what we've learned, so, you know, one of my trips right now is like, this is not your grandfather's seti anymore, right? Our understanding, we went through this major revolution in our understanding of planets about 20 years ago. So you look back at the Greeks, right? And you can see them arguing about whether any other stars had planets other than, you know, the sun. And, you know, it goes back and forth other stars had planets other than the sun. And it goes back and forth.

Some of the Greeks were like, yeah, it's definitely happening. And then Aristotle was like, no, we're the only world in the whole universe that has life. And then as time goes on, it kind of goes back and forth. And even at the turn of the 19th century, people thought planets were incredibly rare. They thought the only way you could get a planet was if two stars passed really close to each other and they kind of like taffy pulled out stuff that would eventually form a planet. And the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people are like, you know what? There's just no planets. No planets, no life, unless something really freaky is going on.

But then 20 years ago, we discovered our first planet orbiting another star. Isn't that crazy when you really think about that 20 years is such a short amount of time? 1998. Yeah, yeah. And nobody knew before that, like nobody knew whether there were any planets, right? You know, when I was starting in astronomy, people were like, well, we don't know whether there's going to be any other planets. And we went from, the first one was actually 96, I think, 95, 96. From that to now, where we know that every freaking star in the sky has a planet, at least one, you know,

pretty much everyone, pretty, I mean, the big, the giant ones, maybe not, but they're so rare that, you know, pretty much every star you see in the sky has a family of planets around it. That is so nuts. It's so nuts that this is such a new discovery. Yeah. I mean, when we think about what we know about the universe, we think that we've had a pretty good understanding of it for a long time.

Right. But the fact that we didn't even know for sure that there are planets. Right, right. In my own lifetime, you know, people were teaching me when I was starting, like, you know, we just don't know. Maybe they're rare. And now we know for certain that they're everywhere. And the thing people have to realize is every one of those planets is a place.

You know what I mean? It's a place you could walk around. Some of them for sure are going to have oceans. There's going to be mountains. There's going to be rain falling. You know, I mean, like they're all freaking places and they're all places where things can happen. You know, planets are basically like nature's way of taking sunlight and doing something interesting with it. So you have 10 billion trillion planets in the universe.

Right. And every one of them is an experiment that's being run. So, you know, the idea that like we're the first time it's's ever, now that we know that, right? Now that we've gone through that revolution and understand that planets are like dime a dozen. Planets, we're not only talking about planets here, we're talking about planets are in the right place for life to form. So there's the idea of the habitable zone, right? So, you know, Mercury sucks. You cannot, you know, Mercury is so hot that there's no way anything's going to happen. And, you know, planets that are far, far enough out, they're going to be so cold, you know, they're so far away from their star that they're going to be so cold that, you know, it's hard to get liquid water on the surface.

So we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone as the place where you can have – you can pour water onto the surface and it'll sit there. It won't freeze and it won't sort of just evaporate away. So all these 10 billion trillion planets I'm talking about are all in the right place for life to form, you know? And so like with that many numbers, that many experiments being run, like you got to be a psychotic pessimist to say that like, this is the only time a civilization has ever happened. Right. But there's still no evidence yet. Obviously we didn't even know that there really absolutely were planets until 20 years ago. Right. But we don't know for sure that there's something else out there. No, no.

This is an argument by, I call it like an argument by exhaustion. You know, if I gave you a bag of 10 billion trillion planets and you have to sort through all of them, right? The odds that you're never going to find another one that built a civilization is pretty, you know, like I said, you're really asking for really serious pessimism. But, you know, we're just getting started with this game, right? Of looking for life. That's why I keep saying it's not, this is not your grandfather's settee

where you point a radio telescope at a star and you kind of wait to see whether somebody's signaling you. Who knows whether they're signaling? Who knows what they'd be using? Now what we can do, because we've got all these planets to stare at, is we're going to be able to stare at them as they pass in front of their star and get the light that passes through their atmosphere. So we're going to like, who knows what we're going to find?

You know, we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore. Over the next, I swear to God, man, in the next 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to the question of life. Maybe not civilizations, that could happen too, but just life on other worlds, you know, and we've never had that before. All the arguments for the entire history of humanity have just been two dudes yelling at each other, right? But in the next 30 years, because the stuff we're building, and now that we know there's planets, we're going to have real data to argue over it. So, man, it's like we're in a whole other ballgame now.

I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for sure that there's something else out there. there yeah if we really do find like some other manhattan on some goldilocks planet yeah it's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is that's that's gonna be very very very strange it will be it'll be a game changer right because for religions for you know i mean wow you know what do you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilization you start making them pay taxes that's what you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilization? You start making them pay taxes. That's what you do. That's right. You go get pissed off that they're not doing what you want them to do.

You should be believing this one. But I think for me the thing is like it's about climate change because what it means is like there's no way – from my perspective that if you have a civilization, you push your planet. You can't stop it in some sense. If you build a civilization, it's going to happen. Well, the only way around it is if you have like a subsistence culture, indigenous Native American culture. Right. Which it seems impossible, but it existed here 200 years ago, which is a blink of an eye. Right, right.

I know. It's amazing it's only 200 years since like this, the ramp up. You know, the world population only crossed the billion mark in like 1850. You know, I mean,

there were so few of us on the planet for most of the time that even we've been around. Forget the planet's history. So, you know, I think like there is, you know,

the discovery, if we were to get any evidence, you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is going to be more by accident than by like signaling, you know, like so, but if we had any evidence of you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is going to be more by accident than by like signaling, you know, like that. So, so, but if we had any evidence of another

technological, if we had any evidence of just life, right, if we just find a biosphere evidence that, you know, and we can do that from a distance, right. Even if the star is, you know, 30 light years away, if we get, if we see as the light passes through the star's atmosphere for those few moments, if we see oxygen in the atmosphere you know we'll be able to detect that that's what we can do with telescopes we can tell like what you can see the fingerprints of the different kinds of elements if we see oxygen in that atmosphere you know and methane that pretty much says that there's a biosphere there that there's life because you wouldn't get oxygen would just like react away really fast if it wasn't for life like in our on on earth if it wasn't for life there'd be no oxygen in the, if it wasn't for life, there'd be no oxygen in the atmosphere.

What are the possibilities of life that exists in a completely different environment than we expect? Like, I know that they found life at the bottom of the ocean in these volcanic vents, at extreme heats, boiling water. They didn't expect to see this. Yeah. And this is fairly recent as well. That is.

Yeah. The idea that the, because right, this whole definition of the habitable zone was based on the idea like, oh, you got to have a surface and it's got to be, you know. But now with the, you know, not every, but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn and the gas giants, they have oceans under them. Well, there's thoughts that Europa might it's covered in ice, right? You can see it's covered in it. And we think that layer of ice is maybe like, I don't know, 10 kilometers thick. And then below that, there may be 100 kilometers of ocean. And because as it moves around Jupiter, the gravity of Jupiter is always squishing the insides. So there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface. So you have hydrothermal vents, you know, heat escaping out of and chemicals escaping out of the surface under the ocean.

And that's how we think life formed on Earth. That's one of the arguments for how life formed, formed first in the hydrothermal vents. So yeah, you know, it's a new, that's another game changer, right? So that we should also be thinking not just about the classic, uh, the habitable zone, but now we got to think about like life and can you get civilizations in an underwater civilization, you know, in an underwater. Maybe you have a really rich ecosystem. But, you know, with the problem with, you know, an underwater life or forming civilization is that you can't really do fire. Right. Fire was pretty important for us for metallurgy, you know, to build advanced technology. You kind of need combustion. So, you know, that's kind of the open question with that.

Yeah. We are not really concerned with animals. We're concerned with things that think and change their environment. Isn't that weird? Like we are concerned with life, but we're only concerned with life that's at least similar or comparable to us. Yeah, microbes don't like – we don't – they don't get too excited. We're not going to go to Jupiter for some microbes. But we are excited about the things that they've recently found on Mars, right? I mean there's very recent discovery.

Right, right. the things that they've recently found on Mars, right? I mean, there's very recent discovery. Right, right. So, you know, the thing is actually from the, you know, so I work in a lot of fields, but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist, right? Which is a pretty kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology,

even though you only have one example, which is the Earth. But we've learned so much that now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere. So finding even a microbe, like even a frigging, you know, amoeba on Mars would be – or even evidence that there used to be amoebas on Mars. What is the evidence that they discovered on Mars? What they found was organic chemistry, right? But organic chemistry – man, I hated chemistry when I was growing up.

And I hated organic chemistry. That's just basically chemistry involving carbon. So you can have non – organic chemistry doesn't mean organisms, but it's the kind of chemistry that organisms love. Right. So finding evidence that there was like, they drilled it. Amazing. Like we sent a freaking robot to Mars that could drill through a rock, you know, and then ingest the rock and, you know, and then send the data back across space.

You know, pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes. Yeah. You know, pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes. Yeah. So what they found was evidence for fairly complex, you know, organic chemistry, which meant that way back when Mars and this we know for sure. Right. Mars had water on it. We know that for sure. Now, Mars was a blue planet. Do they think that Mars was hit by an asteroid or a comet or something along those lines?

Well, everything got hit by comets. That's how we have, you know, we have chunks of Mars here, right? That, you know, the thing in 96 or whatever, when they were like, oh, we found life on Mars, you know, they thought what they found was fossil bacteria in a chunk of Mars that they found in Antarctica. So the planets have been swapping spit for like the entire history of the solar system. That's fossilized bacteria that they found. Has that been confirmed? No, no. Most people now think that the Allen Hills meteorite that probably, you know, it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough

to be like, yeah, we found life. It's like a tiny little squiggly worm looking thing. That's what it was. Yeah. But it was so small that it was like way smaller than any of the microscopic fossilized bacteria we've ever seen before. So people in general are like, nah. But by fine, but that's what started, right? That's when Clinton was like, okay, we're going to send a lot of shit to Mars. Because after – back in 90 – early 90s, people were kind of done with Mars. And so that's what triggered the whole one space probe after another, the rovers. And like so the thing we found was a direct result of that effort, which was this organic chemistry, which says that back in the day, Mars had a lot of this stuff lying around, had a lot of these organic chemicals lying around, which if you're life, that's what you're going to be using. So that's like one more step.

Like we've been putting the Lego blocks for the argument for life on Mars one piece at a time since the first rovers went there. Yeah. If we did discover just even plants on some other planet, even just a planet with some sort of plant-like life. Yeah. That would be, that'd be a game changer. That'd be a game changer. Cause you know, right now we don't know if there's, we, you know, are we the only time in the entire history of the universe that like this crazy thing where you got, we went from non-life to life, like, is that common or is that never, ever, ever happened? So that's the question we want to, you know, we want to you know

we want to answer and i you know i mean like you know that argument i was given before is i think from the probable arguments i'm saying it's like you know it's it's almost overwhelming that yeah it probably happens somewhere again doesn't mean anything's here but we need evidence right science so we got to build that evidence yeah and if we do find something the the one of the weirder things would be if we found something and there was a way to get there yeah you know we we find something the the one of the weirder things would be if we found something and there was a way to get there yeah you know we we find something and like yeah we find something but it's we're pretty sure there's some kind of life and it's three billion light years away like well that's cool yeah what do we do yeah it's nice to know that we're not the only ones yeah well you know

it's interesting like how much would that that change you know even if we found like evidence for this because it's a debate like if how much would that change? You know, even if we found, like, evidence for—this is a debate. Like, if we found evidence of a technological civilization, we saw, like, alien megastructures, like that star they thought about. Yeah, what was that nonsense? It wasn't really nonsense. It was, you know— It was something floating around, right? Well, so here's what they saw.

So, you know, the way we discover planets is we look for—when the planet passes in front of the star, you get a little dip in the light, right? It blocks out a little bit of light. It's like a little eclipse. And so, you know, now that's how we know that every star in the sky has planets. But there's like, they found one that just made no sense. Like the light would dip, then it would stop dipping, then it would dip again three times and it would stop dipping. Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was higher. And, you know, for a year or so, people were like, what the fuck is this, you know? And so, you know, Jason Wright, Jason's a friend of mine, you mine, they wrote a paper where they were like, hey, at least, because this is what the future is going to look like. We can't say, we have to at least consider the possibility that these are artificial structures that are like orbiting the star.

It would have to be ungodly huge. Ungodly huge. Alien megastructures. That's the best word ever. Like the size of a country, right? Yeah, yeah. These things would be huge, right? But that's what people think. Like, you know, when people think about advanced alien civilizations, the idea of building large

scale structures is, you think that may be the next thing you do once you reach a certain point. Like, you know, the Dyson sphere, the idea that you could collect all of the sun's energy and use it for yourself by building a giant sphere around the sun with solar panels on the inside. People think like that goes back to Kardashev's, the idea of this

Kardashev scale back in the sixties, where he was like, look, there's going to be a natural progression of civilizations that goes first, you collect all the energy you can from your planet. And then you use that to do amazing things. And then you collect all the energy from your star. And then you do that, you know, you do amazing shit with that. And then, you know, the whole galaxy. So he, you know, Kardashev thought there was a scale that that civilizations naturally progress through and you hopefully don't blow yourself up along the way well i think that's the question i mean i've criticized the kardashev scale in one of the papers i recently did because what it fails to take into account is the fact that like you know on your way up to the type one

type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet, which basically means somehow covering your planet in solar panels or something. That neglects what we've learned since Kardashev wrote his paper in 64 is that planets don't like that shit. The planet's going to feed back. You try and build massive shit on your planet, the planet has its own – biosphere is pretty powerful and you've got to take the biosphere into account or you get climate change. You get the planet being pushed off in another direction. But whatever. So for the alien megastructures, people thought like, oh, maybe this is like a piece of a Dyson sphere, right? This is like, you know.

And so when he proposed this, people went bonkers over this, right? He was just saying – he's like, look, here's the 15 different things it could be and I'm going to have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial. But for me – and some people got really angry and everything, but I thought like this is Why did they get angry? Because there's been a thing in the community over the years, you know, SETI got a bad name, right? SETI for a bunch of years, SETI was sort of thought as being like, oh, only wackadoodles do that.

But why is that? Just because there was no results? I just think, you know, there was, you know what it is? It's because of shitty TV, you know? I mean, I really, in some ways, right? It's all, you know, it was, you know what it is? It's because of shitty TV. You know, I mean, I really, in some ways, right? It's all, you know, it's prosthetic foreheads, right? It's the whole, we've had so much kind of crappy, you know, speculation about aliens that trying to do anything scientific always had this whiff of sort of being a little,

you know, and then there's the UFO stuff, you know, which is completely separate. It has nothing to do with it. But SETI never really achieved any results, right? There was that one big blip that was highly popularized. The wow signal. Yeah. But here's the thing about SETI. We never really did SETI that much. You know what I mean? Like people have this idea like, wow, we've got telescopes all over the world and they're looking, you know, so the government never funded a SETI study, anything major, right? So people, you know, all that SETI has done is like basically, you know,

some dudes on a telescope get a little extra time. They're like, hey man, look quick, let's go look at a star. Right. You know? So Jill Tarter, who's one of the,

you know, the founders, one of the greats of SETI, she compares it. It's like, you know, we got an ocean that we need to look at and so far we've looked

at a thimble, right? Was she the Jodie Foster character? She's the Jodie Foster character. Yeah. Contact. Yeah. Yeah. So she's,

and it's a good point. Like we haven't really looked yet so the idea that you know the stars are silent or anything it's like man come on we haven't even begun to do a comprehensive survey seti makes me sad why because i feel like they're wasting their time and uh there's a there was a documentary i saw once about some biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth was still alive and that there was examples of them in South America. And this poor bastard had spent more than a decade looking for this giant sloth in South America. And there was this moment where he was chasing down this supposed dung pile and they were looking for it. They were, you know, and he had this look in his eyes where like, he was like, holy

shit, what if I waste my fucking life and my academic career chasing down something that's not even real. That's kind of how I've always felt about SETI. Yeah. But that's not the way the people, I mean, everybody who's involved in it, um, you know, I don't do SETI, you know, I meanI. I mean I respect the people who are doing it. But most of them are like, look, this is just a multi-generational thing. And even if I don't find it, I'm laying the foundation.

It's like cathedrals, right? It took like how many generations did it take to build a cathedral in medieval Europe? Right, sure. So the first guy who laid the stone was like, I'm not going to see this. Maybe my great-grandkid. So most of them are like – they know that this is going to – is a huge, it's like the most important question in humanity, right? Are we alone? And they're willing to accept that.

Like, you know, if you're going to do it scientifically, you're going to have to do it brick by frickin' brick, you know? And so you just have to accept that and, you know, go on. But like I said, I think we've, you know, this is a new era now. So the idea of like looking for signals, which assumes that somebody is putting out signals, right? That's a huge assumption right there. But now that we know that there's all these planets and we're staring at all these planets, it's kind of we need to be thinking differently about – we need to be prepared for like what happens when we see something we don't understand. Well, it's also we don't even use radio anymore. Right.

Right. Cable. I mean, radio is dying slowly but surely. Local radio is, I mean, it's kind of a thing of the past. Yeah, right. The only thing that's really we're beaming out large scale is military radars. That's the main thing. So there would be some kind of signal.

It wouldn't necessarily have to be radar or radio. It would just have to be something that we could detect, some form of anomaly that seemed to be radar or radio. It would just have to be something that we could detect, some form of anomaly that seemed to be artificial. Right. So here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about. So Avi Loeb at Harvard talks about the idea, maybe what you need, and you're going to need the sensitivity for this, you're going to see rocket engines going back and forth between a multi-planet civilization and you're going to see little flares as rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth.

People have talked about seeing city lights. You know, the telescopes are getting, you know, we're building these giant telescopes. They're like 30 meters across. Where there may be a potential one day to see a city light. You could see city lights. You know, you're going to see the planet come around. Like this is all like, you know, we're not there yet. 20 years, 30 years.

30 years, 40 years. You know, this is a long game. And you've got to be playing the long game. At some point, we're going to need to build stuff in space that's even larger so we can collect more light. And won't the issue also be that if we do see these city lights, we're seeing city lights from millions of years ago? Well, it depends. A planet that's in a star 10 light years ago, that's 10 years ago. So it's not like these things could still be around. Here's a really interesting idea.

Because one of the things that I'm talking about in my book is like, how long does any civilization last? Right. That's the real question. All of this stuff is super relevant for us now, because the question is what is the average lifetime of a civilization? So you might be able to see artifacts from civilizations that are gone. Like imagine a civilization covered one of its moons in, in, um, of its moons in solar panels, right? The reflected light is going to show a spectral signature of the panels, you know? So it's like, they don't even have to necessarily be alive now that we still might be able to see stuff from there, you know, evidence of like artificial structures or something that's not natural around them. So, you know, that's the thing, man. It's like we're really, we're just, we're about to take this step in astrobiology where we're, you know, we're already running models of exobiospheres, right,

which we're asking like, oh, what kind of chemistry can you have if you don't like, if you have photosynthesis on a planet around a star that's smaller than ours, that star is going to be mostly red as opposed to yellow like ours. So the light that's coming off it is going to be different. Can you have photosynthesis in that case? And people are like, yeah, you probably could. And what would it look like? So we're already doing the work to be ready for exobiospheres. So exocivilizations, we kind of need to be prepared for that too, looking for what could be the traces, what might we see from a distance from an exocivilization? They don't have to be signaling us. They're just there and we're going to catch some

aspect of their being around. If we did see rocket, if we did see some sort of a signature from rockets going back and forth, we would have to assume that this is a similarly aged civilization to ours. Whereas if we saw something that was

a thousand, a hundred thousand years advanced, we probably wouldn't see that anymore. We'd probably see some sort of a manipulation of time and space. Right. If that's possible. If it's possible. If it's possible. Yeah.

So that's – I mean, of course, that is one of the problems is that when you start pushing – it's just like saying like what are we going to be like in a million years? Who the frick knows? I mean, it's so long. So I think you start with what you know. And the cool thing about the planet part though, is that, you know, unless they become like energy beings, you know, they're going to have an effect on their planet. So looking at their planets to look for, you know, for spectral indications, that's probably, even after they die, there might even be things. So that's, I think, you know, a good way to go. Yeah. I'm, you know, I'm so curious as to what we're going to be able to do in a thousand years and ten thousand years and a hundred thousand years.

If civilization does stay around and we figure out how to not melt the earth or boil the oceans or whatever the fuck we're doing wrong. All the other crap we're doing, yeah, right. But there's a bunch of science fiction films that do speculate speculate what's going to be possible in the future. And one of them was that recent one with, what's his name? All right, all right. What's his name? What the fuck's his name? Matthew McConaughey.

Matthew McConaughey. Matthew McConaughey. The one where they go through the wormholes. Right. How much do those movies piss you off? They don't. They don't at all. I do not.

I mean. But they get so good. I love science fiction. So, you know, I mean, I do not need my science fiction. To be correct? They don't. They don't at all? I do not. I mean, I love science fiction. So, you know, I mean, I do not need my science fiction to be correct.

I mean, you know, if they want to make it, you know, so I love The Expanse. The Expanse is my favorite show ever. I will talk about it. What is The Expanse?

The Expanse? I don't even know. Thank you. Help me. So The Expanse, it's a series of books, first of all, that I think are the best

science fiction books in the last 15 years. Really? And then they made it into a series of books, first of all, that I think are the best science fiction books in the last 15 years. Really? And then they made it into a show on sci-fi. And then they had three years of it. And at first, people were like, oh, this is kind of hard to follow because it's a lot of stories coming together. And then this year, it got 100% ratings.

Or what is it? Rotten Tomatoes? Rotten Tomatoes. 100% or 95%. People love the show. And then freaking sci-fi canceled it, you know? And so then Jeff Bezos just, yeah, Jeff Bezos just picked it up. Oh, good for you, Jeff.

Because people love this show, man. Fuck yeah, rich man. All right, so let me tell you why this show is amazing, right? So it takes place about 200 years from now, and we are truly a multi-planet species. Like, Mars now has, you know, a billion people on it, and it's become its own political power, right? It's separated from the Earth. And then the asteroid belt has also people are colonizing and, you know, living on the asteroid belt to, you know, mine resources. But the belters, as they call them, are like – they're like second-class citizens.

They're basically like super poor and they're – you know, they got the boot on their necks by either Earth or Mars. And so there's this whole interplanetary kind of political shit going on, which is just great. And then there's – you enter into this. They discover like what they call the protomolecule. This is basically this alien molecule that was really a device that some aliens threw our way billions of years ago. That was – how much am I supposed to give away? So no, not too much spoiler alert. It's OK. No one's going to remember.

All right, good, good. So complicated. So that becomes kind of a weapon in this political intrigue. So it's just a great story. It's kind of what people call it, like the Game of Thrones in space. But I'll tell you what I love about it

is that this is what it's going to look like. Like they get the science on this show so right, as much as you can, right? So, you know, in space, if your rocket motors are on, there's gravity. Because, you know, the rocket motors push up towards you. And so, yeah, you've got gravity. You can walk around. When you turn the rocket motors off, you float around, right?

On spinning things, you know, anything. So, you know, in this universe, you know, in the fictional universe, they've taken the big asteroids and they've hollowed them out and spun them up. So people live on the inside, you know. And so at one point, like one of the characters, the private eye and they've hollowed them out and spun them up. So people live on the inside. And so at one point, like one of the characters, the private eye, they got this great sort of film noir thing going on. And he pours a drink, some whiskey. And the whiskey does this. It spirals into this. So they got the Coriolis effect. It's like I peed my pants.

I was like, oh, my God, they got the Coriolis effect right. So it's like this is really what it's going to look like. You know what I mean? This is, if you want to imagine 200 years from now, which I think is completely feasible that we have millions of people

living in space. Do they make any advances socially? No. No? People are assholes to each other and that's what makes it. But it's only 200 years. That's a lot to ask for.

Well, think about how different we are from people that lived 50 years ago. I mean, are we that different? I think we're quite a bit different. In what way? What do you think? I think we're, well, we have this ability to communicate now that we never did before.

Yeah. Where everybody has an ability to say their piece about how they feel about how things are going. Yeah. No, that's interesting, right? And that has changed a lot of things in a lot of ways. But I mean, has it changed who we are? I mean, I think evolution. I think it's mean has it changed who we are i mean i think

evolution i think it's chipping away yeah well that would be good if it could i'm you know because one of the things my thing so what's interesting about this fictional world too is that like climate you know the earth is dealing with climate the earth has like 30 billion people on it and you know new york is halfway underwater and so that's part of the story too is that you know so we're trying to navigate our way through now becoming a multi-planet species. So, you know, that is a version of at least 200 years where you can really extrapolate the technologies and ask yourself. Because that's real. I mean, I think that's really going to happen. If we make it through climate change, that's the prize at the end of the, you know, of the story.

If we make it through climate change, you know, with the stuff that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are doing, man, that's real. Is this what your number one concern is? Climate change? Michael, I'm a single voter. Yeah, climate change. Because it's like it is an existential dilemma. You know, and because of all the writing I did for NPR and The New York Times, I have dealt with a lot of climate change denialists, man. And it drives me.

What is their big? What's the big? Because I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change. I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change. And it was a weird thing because I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies, all the different studies that show that we were having an impact. It's an undeniable impact. Undeniable.

Under 30 years of science. I saw that and she was like, you know, that's what you say. I don't think that she's really thinking about that. In her case, it was, I don't think she really thinks about it. I think she just has this stance that she believes that that group that she's a part of, that's what it is, subscribes to. So there's an ideological aspect of it where you kind of, you have a predetermined pattern that you're supposed to follow when you're on one side. You have to be pro-life. You have to be pro-second amendment. All this whole bucket of stuff.

There's a bucket of stuff that you got out. There's a bucket of stuff. Yeah. And I think it's a giant problem with our culture. Oh, it's huge. There are two groups of people that you can't... To truly be an independent thinker, you're like one of these weirdos that's off in the fringe. To be independent of either party. Right. Right. And the thing about science is the whole point of science- Is to be independent. Is to be... And to have... What science is-

Facts. Science is a way of having public knowledge. You independent. Is to be, and to have, you know, what science is, science is a way of having public knowledge. You know what I mean? Like everybody has their opinions, whatever, but science is about the stuff we can all be like,

oh yeah, for sure. You know, it's this whole process that we've evolved over 400 years and with climate denial, man,

sometimes, you know, it's just, you know, you want to be like, what are you saying, man? Like what,

you know, read a book because they'll say stuff like here's my favorite one. Climate's always changing. Hey man, climate's always changing, man. Which is true. saying, man? Like, what? You know, read a book because they'll say stuff. Like, here's my favorite one. Climate's always changing. Hey, man, climate's always changing, man. Which is true. Yeah, but if so, if somebody comes to me, because, you know, what I want most for people,

like, I consider myself an evangelist of science. I love science. And so if people come to me and say, hey, man, isn't the climate always changing? I'm like, oh, man, great question. You know, we actually know the answer to that. Yeah, it's changing, but it's changing. Like, what's the timescale? You know, so it changes often on million year timescales, but like from the last 10,000 years since the last ice age, which was 10,000 years ago, which is amazing. Like there used to be a mile of ice

above our heads, you know, 10,000 years ago, climate has been remarkably stable. Yeah. There's been a little blips in it, but no major changes. Right. So like, and I can show them the graph of this and everything. So if you're, if you know, if they're interested, you know, I mean, so if they're asking the question because they want to know, I'm down to talk until the cows come home. But that's not what typical deniers are. Deniers are like, get climate changing all the time. And they're not interested in the answer. But isn't it, not only are they not interested in the answer, they're just trying to win. It's not a real conversation because it's a really complex thing. If you

dig an ice core and you tap down to 50,000, 80,000, 100,000 years, you see all these bizarre shifts of the climate that could be indicative of super volcanoes and asteroidal impacts and solar flares. A lot of shit happens over the course of a million years. But to hang all your ideas on the party's ideology and to deny all this really interesting stuff and all these variables. That's what pisses me off. It's like, you know, what I try and tell people is like, look, climate science is like awesome. Like it's science. It's got these amazing stories to tell about, you know, yeah, the earth, I mean, earth over the past 4.5 billion years, the earth has gone through the most profound

changes and we've learned about, aren't you interested in that? But no, right. They basically have this thing where like, you know, I'm part of this group and therefore I have to have this opinion. And I'm like, dude, it's science. Science doesn't care who you voted for. You know what I mean? Like the radiative properties of a CO2 molecule doesn't care whether you're wearing a blue tie or a red tie. And the fact that people can't make that distinction. And here's the real problem. Once you go down this slippery road of denying, saying like, okay, that kind of science, I hate, man, they're all a hoax. Well, you know, America's prosperity and our safety has been built on science over the last 200 years. You know, you start to erode the whole thing.

You can't just like call one group of scientists hoaxsters, you know, and it's all they're only doing for them and not have it slowly infect everything else to the point where like, you know, China will be happy to eat our lunch. You know, when it comes scientifically, China is pumping huge amounts of money into science. You're not doing this. So like, you know, we're limiting. And here's the other thing that really bums me out. Science is not a lunch buffet. You know what I mean? You can't be like, oh, man, can I have some of those antibiotics?

I love antibiotics. And oh, yeah, the cell phone's great. I'll use that. I really want to fly in a plane. But climate change is bullshit. You know? I mean, like, you know, either you accept that you live in a scientific society. It doesn't mean like you're slavishly adhered to anything that comes out in a journal yesterday.

But either you adhere to the idea that this method has produced miracles for us or give me the cell phone back. You know what I mean? Well, the scientific method is what has established the actual real facts of how things interact with each other that's allowed us to create technology. Right. And I think they split that distinction. They focus on the technology and commerce, which is more important in their eyes than the consequences of the environment

or what's gonna happen to the environment. This is the big hope is that we're gonna figure it out. And I'm hopeful of that too, is that we're going to figure out some way to extract carbon from the atmosphere with devices or some enormous... Like there was some... I don't know if it was a working prototype

or it's just a concept, but there was an enormous building that was really an air filter. Yeah, they're starting to look at carbon capture again. With places like Hong Kong and places where they have terrible... Beijing, where they have terrible, terrible pollution and more importantly, particulates in the atmosphere.

Yeah. So it's not just a, like a carbon thing. It's like they have shit in their air. Right. Right. That they're breathing in their lungs. It's awful, man. It's, you know, I went to Mexico city a couple of years back.

I've been there twice, but I went there for a UFC and we were flying in. I took photos and I put them on my Instagram. See, see if you can find those. They're fucking shocking. It's unbelievable. What kind of a creepy animal is the human where the human is capable of burning smoke into the very air that we need to take into our lungs to keep our body alive? Oh, you see it so bad.

People have never been to Mexico City. Like it's a stunner. Dude, my fucking head was killing me after two days there. Yeah, well, that's what happened with Beijing when they had the Olympics, right? They had to stop all industrial activity for like two months. Right. Well, you know, LA used to look like this, right? Yeah.

Before the Clean Air Act, LA would have- Well, that's what I wrote. I wrote Mexico's LA on steroids. Right. Mexico City's LA on steroids. I mean, it's so dark. You know, this whole question of what we'll do, like this brings us back to the aliens, right? So my point is, is that, you know, we're not the first time this has happened.

Pretty much if you build a civilization, anybody who builds a civilization like we've done is going to trigger climate change, right? It's like it's kind of unavoidable, right? So that goes back to the denier thing. You know, one of the things I'm trying to do with the book is flip the script, right? Because you talk to climate denialists, and it's the same freaking set of things that like, you know, man, dude, we've been here before, the question's been answered. But I'm trying to like flip it to show that like the whole question of, you know, did we change the climate? That's what everybody focuses on. Did we, did we not, you know? And, you know, from when you take the 10,000 light year view, then what you realize is

like, what did you expect? Like we built a world girdling civilization that uses a quarter almost of all the energy the biosphere uses, right? So, you know, every, you know, every day the biosphere has like, you know, 200 terawatts of energy that it's producing in sugars. We use about a quarter of that. Like, how did you expect there wasn't going to be an impact, right? So this changes the whole way we're looking at it. We don't need to argue about like, did we or didn't we? Of course we did. This is what happens when you reach this level. And the other thing that, you know, in the book that I'm trying to argue to also, and it pushes back against the deniers is like, well, climate deniers are human haters. You know, they're all like, you know, like, you know, we did this amazing thing. We changed the

atmosphere of an entire planet, right? Climate change shows on one level, how freaking awesome we are, you know, how far we've gotten. And if you look at the, you know, from the perspective of, you know, species doing this again and again across the universe, this shows that we've reached a level, right? We have, we've leveled up, right?

You know, I play a lot of video games, right? And so that whole thing when you level up and, you know, you get the sniper rifle, we've leveled up. And so now the question is, are we smart enough, you know, to see what we've done and make the right choices? Because that so now the question is, are we smart enough, you know, to see what we've done and make the right choices? Because that's what the universe is going to be. There's

going to be species that trigger climate change. It's going to happen all the time. And some are going to be like, oh man, we need to do something, right? And they'll make the actions. They'll be able to work it out, get it together. And other ones, you know, who are just going to end up in the cosmic waste pile. So we're like cosmic teenagers. And just like when you're a teenager and you're, you know, you start to drive, right? Either you figure it out, you know, either you're drinking and you're partying and drive the car off a cliff or you figure out how to handle your responsibility. And that's us now. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with you. And I feel like there's a fundamental problem with the way people approach ideas. And I think it goes back to what we're talking about earlier about right versus

left or, you know or Republican versus Democrat. They're not thinking of the consequences of arguing against the possibility that climate change is a human-caused thing. They're not thinking of the consequences. They just want to win. Right, right. They want their side to be right. They want their side to be right. And what bums me out is they don't understand the consequences of that for both the American enterprise and the human enterprise.

the consequences of that for the both the american enterprise and the human enterprise right i mean because you know uh if you if you keep calling one branch of science a hoax then what's to say the other branches like well you know then you just you're down you're rolling down this you know slippery slope where like the other countries you know like so most of the of the um nobel prizes americans have won were people from other countries they came here to do their science because we had the best scientific enterprise. The next generation will just go somewhere else. They'll go to China, you know. So there's that part of it. And the other part is like, dude, it's just science. It doesn't care about your political views. And, you know, it's not fair to use the cell phone and take the antibiotics and then turn around and like and then suddenly treat this thing as if it was another thing in your bucket of, you know, ideologies.

I think also people think if you somehow or another compromise industry's ability to work, that you're going to kill jobs and you're going to damage the economy. And that's more important. Yeah, but I think it's the exact opposite. Right. And if people really saw. Right. I mean, you know, again, just like I'm saying, climate change shows how powerful people have become and also shows how powerful our enterprise, right? We did this by, you know, building businesses, by building enterprise, by, and we built this world girdling machine of civilization and it, you know, the planet actually noticed. Why do you like that term world girdling? Because that's, it gives me the...

Like a girdle wrapping around the Earth? I think it's because, it's from like Shakespeare, like from Caesar or something. I always thought it was a good... But it's the idea that like, you know, in the Foundation Trilogy, the Isaac Asimov, you know, classic science fiction thing, there's the city of, the planet of Trantor,

which is the center of the empire, the galactic empire. And it's, you know, it's basically the whole planet's been covered in empire. And it's basically the whole planet's been covered in city. You've got to go down like 500 levels before you get to the surface. So that idea, what I like about it is the idea that we've done something, we're kind of covered the planet in our effect, covered the planet in our enterprise. So this issue of business is that there's a place I can

stand in Rochester. I did this for NPR and there's the Erie Canal. I can stand right on the edge of the Erie Canal. Then there's a train tracks, you know, the tracks was laid, those tracks were laid back in the original line back in the 18th, you know, whatever, seventies. Then there's a highway and then there's the airport right over there. Four different infrastructures, you know, which everyone took huge amounts of money to build. One of which we don't even use anymore, right? So the idea of building an infrastructure that will not be carbon polluting, will not trigger climate change, like, dude, this is what we do, you know? So the idea that there's going to be more jobs that come out of this than it could ever come out of fossil fuels, you know? It's not a big deal for human beings, because that's what we do,

to switch infrastructures. And there will be a lot of wealth generated by, just like there was when we switched to the trains. Where's the argument coming? Because there are people that just adopt the party line, the party line that climate's always changed and human beings barely affect it, and it's not something to concentrate on. Where's that coming from? Again, I think it's the gradual political polarization of everything. Because if you look at in the – we're now at the – what is it? 30-year anniversary of Jim Hansen who was a famous climate scientist giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 on a hot, sweltering summer day.

We said climate change is already happening. And that made news everywhere. And that was the first like public awakening that this was happening. And if you look at the first Bush administration, they were like, oh, yeah, we're ready to do something about this. Sure, we can do it, you know. And then it just gradually over time as the whole political polarization thing happened, you can actually see the very purposeful denial, right?

They took a page out of the cigarette companies, you know, for years, right? Cigarettes were like, oh, the cigarette companies were like, no, it's not a problem. So they were purposefully, you know, there were people who had money invested, right? You know, like didn't want this change. There's a documentary that goes into that. What is the name of that? Merchants of Doubt? Merchants of Doubt.

That's a great book, man. That's a really good book, yeah. And the documentary is really good, too. So it was purposeful, you know? But it's also confusing. It's like, why are they doing that? Like, who's paying them to do that? Obviously, the cigarette companies would be paying the same people to put doubt into the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer.

And this is what had been done in the past. Now, the same people are involved in doing it with climate change. But why? Now the same people are involved in doing it with climate change. But why? Well, you know, one time I wrote a piece for the NPR that was kind of positive about like, yeah, we can switch infrastructures, like I'm saying. And some guy wrote me back very angry. And he said, you know, the proven reserves, you know, the stuff, the oil that's in the

ground has a wealth, you know, has a monetary value. Like, you know, that's in the oil company's banks, you know, in their bank accounts of like $1.5 trillion. And the guy said, dude, you know, people have gone to war for a lot less than $1.5 trillion. So, you know, if, if we were to really be like, Hey man, we can't burn that, you know, you're going to have to leave that in the ground. That's like their bank accounts going like, you know, down to zero pretty fast. So what I don't see, it's those industries. I think that's part of it. And then it gets, you get linked to other things and then it becomes this sort of like mass, uh, you know, it becomes the political poll. They use the political polarization to sort of,

you know, sort of make this happen. It doesn't, and you look, other countries aren't doing this, right? That's the important thing. You know, other countries, there's always a little bit of climate denial going on, but we're like the only country that's got, as you can see, cause we're the only ones who are not part of the Paris Accord. Well, it's one of the weirder things about this right-left thing is the left is always supporting the environment. The left is all about the environment. The left is about clean air and clean water. Yeah, how did that happen?

I don't understand. Yeah, I don't understand that either. The whole thing is very strange. Well, I got, you know, I mean, I have issues with, you know, environmentalists too because I think one of your shows I was watching, you know, the whole idea of eco bros, right? And you get eco broed by people. And so I have a piece in the New York Times today, an op-ed where I'm basically saying like, look, man, the planet's going to be fine. Like, you know, long-term there's nothing we can throw at the biosphere that is going to kill it. We're not about saving the planet. The earth is not a fuzzy little bunny. You know, the planet is powerful and it's really about saving us. Let's be honest about what's going on. And there's going to be all kinds of ethical choices that go on that, you know,

the polar bears may not be able to come along with us on the ride here. You know, we need a healthy biosphere with, you know, a lot of biodiversity, but you know, we're part of it and we're going to have an impact. There's no such thing as no impact. And, you know, already I'm getting eco-broed. People are like, hey man, you know, you don't care about life. Yeah. What about, I just like, oh, come on, man. I just put just put it in the thing i said we need to be wise and compassionate you know but they're like well people have convenient opinions i mean this is this is one of the things you get involved with when you start talking with people about really important issues i mean it's like we were talking about earlier they want to be right

yeah and they want to be on the side that's righteous and with virtue and ethics. Right, right. And they find anything that you disagree or that they disagree with that you're saying, they don't ask you questions. They don't go, what do you think the implications are? How do we minimize the effects and the negative consequences of our, they just immediately want to say, you are insensitive. You are an asshole.

You are the problem. Yeah. You know my way around that, and that's what the whole book is about, is to like when you've got a polarization, right, you know, where you're either this or you're that. The thing that – and this is like a mathematical idea – is to go orthogonal, you know. When you – you know, you go – because, you know, it's a line basically, right? You're either on this side or that side. Go 90 degrees to it. Now you're in a whole new space.

Now you're up and down instead the left and right exactly and now like the questions that so you see this in like revolutions in science right so you look at einstein and what happened when einstein came up with relativity everybody at the time was like you know um they were all concerned with what they call the luminiferous ether that you know light needed lights a wave and everybody thought it needed something to propagate through right radio way or um water waves go through water. Sound wave goes through air. So, you know, the whole thing was about this ether, the luminous ether. Does it exist?

Does it not exist? Einstein was like, you know, I'm not really interested in that problem. I'm not even going to do it. He just like changed the whole thing. And he just said, look, here's two new ideas. They have nothing to do with the luminous ether. And like all the old questions, all the old battles kind of just fell away. They didn't even make sense

anymore. So that's what I'm trying to do in the book is say, look, when you look at climate change as a planetary transition, a predictable planetary transition, the whole idea of like environmentalism versus, you know, business interests and, you know, right, Republicans versus Democrats, it just doesn't, you know, it's not even relevant anymore. What matters is that this is going to happen. We should have expected it to happen. And now the question is, do we become a cosmic winner or a cosmic loser? And we have to think about the biosphere differently. We have to think about our place in the biosphere differently.

And the old arguments. So that's what, you know, sometimes with climate change and Irish, I'll throw this stuff at them. And it's really kind of fun to watch them be like, bleh. Because they're expecting me to say like A, B, and C. And they've got D, E, and F in response. And I throw this stuff at them and and they're just like, ah. And I'm not doing it just to fight with climate change, but I think it's true. Well, who was it that was on the podcast that was talking about climate stabilization techniques and that this is probably the future?

Was it Boyan? Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, what people are really worried about when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the earth is climate cooling. They think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming. Because if we go into a giant ice age again, I mean, way more people are going to die, terrible loss of resources, and it could be devastating to the human race. That is – is that something that you agree with? Yeah, no, I don't think so.

I mean, it's, it's true. You know, and here's something interesting. We're kind of overdue for an ice age. Yeah. Well, that was the thing in the seventies. They were saying that we were in the verge of an ice age. Yeah. I mean, that, you know, there was just a couple of guys.

I mean, that whole thing, you know, cause that, that's often something that climate deniers will throw at you in the seventies. You know, it was like, there was like one or two guys who said that and then it got picked up on the news. But the climate community at that time was not 70s, you know, it was like there was like one or two guys who said that, and then it got picked up on the news. But the climate community at that time was not like, oh, my God, it's cooling. Right. But here's the interesting thing for me, and it fits into this whole idea, is that, like, we're holding off an ice age.

Like, there may never be – if humanity is successful and we navigate the Anthropocene, you know, that term, the Anthropocene, that we've now entered the human-dominated era. We've been – for the last 10,000 years, the geological epoch has been what they call the Holocene. That's all of human civilization happened in the Holocene. You know, it's pretty warm. It's pretty wet, moist. Everything's not locked up in ice. And it's an interglacial period.

And if we weren't around, yeah, another 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 years would be another ice age. But the Anthropocene that we're triggering could hold off ice ages forever, right? As long as we're around, there won't be another ice age because we've already added enough warmth to the planet that it overcomes the effects that trigger an ice age. So like, what are the ethical responsibilities of that? That's what I try and tell the, you know, the environmentalists, like, you know, you got this image like, oh, we got to save the earth, but they're thinking of like the Holocene. And it's like, well, you know, the planet, even with us, even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich and it's not going to be the earth we started with, you know, because we're here. So, yeah. What about the species that never form because we held off the ice age? You know, I mean, forever. Like, what about the ethical responsibility to those? So like it opens. Boy, that is a long equation though, isn't it? In what way?

To try to contemplate what species would have existed if we allowed the earth to cool. And our responsibility for allowing the earth to cool so that the potential for new species to advance. That's like, fuck those species. Let's keep this place warm so we can stay alive. Well, all I'm saying, the only reason I'm raising that, I'm raising that because when we talk about climate change, what you get sometimes with the environmental movement is this sort of like the polar bear, the polar bear. It's like what I'm trying to say is, look, I love polar bears. Kind of funny that polar bears always think because polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood in a second.

Yeah, right. The most ruthless. Apex predator, man. Not only that, they're one of the rare bears that doesn't eat anything but meat. Yeah, right, right. And so it's so funny that we're like, oh, polar bears. My friend Kevin is a biologist, and he said, like, when you get polar bear babies, like, right out of the womb, he said they're like the alien from the chestburster scene.

He said they literally are like, ah, ah, ah, like, right out of the womb, they're looking to kill and eat. Yeah, you're like, oh, you're so cute. Oh, whoa, man, man, man. Yeah, it's like, that is a fucking, obviously, people have tamed them and fed them to the point where they don't never worry about. They're not looking to chew your head off. Yeah, but that's a fucking predatory, enormous animal.

Yeah. So I'm raising that point to say, like, look, the thing we're going through now is a, it's an epic-making planetary transition. And we're part of it, right? And whether or not we're still part, that's the question. Whether or not we're still part of it a thousand years from now, you know, is the big issue. So, you know, there are ethical issues about the polar bear, right? But there are also ethical issues, you know, we can't just return the earth to some pristine state. We're here, there's seven billion of us, you know.

So, you know, you have to, we're going to have to understand like there's this deeper ethical question about what does an earth look like that's been changed by us, that's healthy, but still has us on it. It may not have polar bears, you know, it may have rich phytoplankton, you know, and it may be very species diverse, but some of the species may not come with us. So like, we can't, this sort of like thing of like, oh, the pristine earth, there is no more pristine earth. We, you know, we've been changing the earth since we were here. So it's like, how do we have a healthy have a rich, healthy biosphere with us and our civilization still in it? And the thing about things that have gone extinct in the past and more than 90% of everything that's ever existed is extinct. The problem is we didn't know then. Right.

We didn't have a checklist. Like, oh, spotted owl, check, got it. Tree frog, check, got it. Now we do, and when one goes away, we kind of freak out. Yeah, and that's, you know, I mean, we have to have compassion for life because we're part of it.

Without the compassion, we end up with, as Gavin Schmidt, a friend of mine, calls, we have ecological hooliganism, right? We just do crazy, we're just dumping shit into rivers. You don't have to do that, man. But in my talks on this, I'll like the polar bear the lonely polar bear on the island and you know like oh everyone's really you know bummed out about this and then i'll show like a velociraptor right you know who's crying for the velociraptor right species come and go so we have to you know and the earth goes through these huge transitions i'm not

saying be like don't care about those species, but you got to have the bigger picture with us. And here's the problem with the environmental movements. Sometimes the way it gets framed, it's not just the environment. It's the way we talk about climate change. We think of ourselves as being a plague, right? Oh, human beings, we suck, right? That's the basic. That's the only story.

We have two stories. It's not happening or we suck. And my whole thing is like that is the wrong. Not only is that story wrong, it's unhelpful. You know, we are what the biosphere is doing now. You know, millions of years ago, it was grasslands. You know, grasslands were a new innovation and they changed the planet. You have a lot of grass, you know, the biosphere evolved grasslands. They swept across the planet. They changed how the planet worked. And then the Earth moved on with it, went on to the new experiment. We're exactly that.

We are like the dinosaurs or the grasslands or the blue-green algae that created the oxygen atmosphere. And there's no difference between a city and a forest on some biospheric level. We don't suck. The question is whether we're smart enough to still be part of what the biosphere is using us to trigger. You know what I mean? Yeah. What are your thoughts on the reintroduction of extinct animals through genetic cloning?

Uh, you know, I watch Jurassic Park. They're talking about doing it with woolly mammoths. Yeah. This is a real possibility someday. Because the close ancestor of the woolly mammoth is still alive. Right. I know.

I'd be down for seeing a woolly mammoth. In the science museum in Rochester, there's a woolly mammoth that they found. And sometimes I'm looking at that and I'm like, that's a giant hairy ass elephant, man. And it was walking around right in my, you know. I think like, depending on what you do with it, you know, trying to reintroduce it into the biosphere could be a little dangerous. I mean, the thing, look, climate change is something I like to say. Climate change is not our fault. And what I mean by that is we, you know, we found fossil fuels and they were awesome, you know, and they were just a continuation of what we'd always done, you know.

And so we inadvertently, climate change was a mistake, you know. Now, if we don't do something about it, it's our fault, right? But, you know, and so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences. Climate change was a mistake. Now, if we don't do something about it, it's our fault. And so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences. So this is my same thing with geoengineering. People talk like, oh, we should put particulates in the atmosphere to make it more reflective. I'm like, man, dude, we triggered climate change because we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know what the consequences were.

If we put those particles up there, how do we get them out? Are we going to scoop them out with a net? Well, no, no. They'll rain down. You've got to keep putting them in. That's the problem. You've got to keep putting them in. So what happens if, like, one nation decides they don't want to do it anymore, you know,

or the whole thing falls apart? Now suddenly you're going to get massive changes. So, like, anything like that, like, why don't we just work on not using fossil fuels? You know what I mean? Like, why take the hardest solution that's got the most uncertainty as opposed to the simpler solution, which just means building a different infrastructure? Yeah. Well, especially in California. I mean, this is one of the weirder places ever to not see solar power when it never

rains. Should be everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah. Most things should be run on solar power. Yeah. Why not, man? And solar isn't so efficient now.

Well, it's also very difficult to get it up and running. I had a friend of mine who had his done for four or five months before he got approved because he said they make it difficult for you. Yeah, which is crazy. Yeah, to be on solar power and not be on the grid. Yeah. So, I mean, these are all the kinds of things that we're going to have to work out. I'm hopeful. People are like, are you hopeful or not hopeful? Because, you know, I mean, I ran all the kinds of things that we're going to have to work out. I'm hopeful. People are like, are you hopeful or not hopeful? Because, you know, I mean, I ran these, I did these models. One of the pieces of research we did was we modeled planets and civilizations, like alien civilizations. And we developed a simple mathematical model about how a civilization will use a planet's resources to make more babies, alien babies. And then how the, you know, by using those resources, you feed back on the planet.

Right. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to model the possible outcomes. Like what is the generic outcome? You know, if I've got 100,000 civilizations all being born in different places, what's the, you know, in general what happens? And what we found is like basically four different possibilities. One was good news. Like in these models, there was like, you know, the population shoots up, the planet's temperature shoots up, but they come to a nice steady state. Like, you know, the population's stable, everything's good.

So there in those models was hope. We also saw die off where like the population, you know, skyrockets the planet. They overshoot the carrying capacity of their planet. And then you get something like 70% of the population dying off. So like, you know, seven out of every 10 people you know is gone. So, you know, but then you come to a steady state. So maybe if you can survive the disaster, you can, you're still there. But we also- The real problem with surviving the disaster is how much of the information gets restored. Right, right. Because you think about if you're killing seven out of 10 people, how many

of those seven people are the ones who know how to make cell phones? Yeah, exactly. That's a dark age, right? That's what happens in a dark age. I remember the first time I went to Europe and I saw those Roman, you know, the aqueducts, man, like five stories tall carrying water, you know, and by the 900 AD, nobody knew how they got built. Yeah. There's a few of those dips in human civilization. Right. And so it's not clear, especially with a society as complex as ours. Right. If like the food doesn't arrive in my grocery store, what do I do? Right. You know, I garden, but you know, I'm not. It's not enough.

Not enough. Right. It's not going to keep you alive. Yeah. So for a complex civilization like ours, even if you don't go extinct, you may not be able to have this kind of civilization. But we did find collapse. We did find complete extinction curves as well, where the population went way up and then, boom, dropped like a stone. And we even found those. We built into the models the possibility for the civilization to switch from a high-impact resource to a low-impact resource, like fossil to solar. And sometimes, because, you know, planets have minds of their own. There's an internal dynamics to planets.

And you push them far enough, and they're just going to roll off. So we'd have ones where the population went way up. They made the switch. And then the population started to come down. The planets started to cool down. Did you factor in random geological events, random solar events, random asteroid events? This was really all about just planet civilization and its feedback on the planet. We could build models like that.

That would be one of the major issues with any advanced civilization is it's a matter of time before something happens. As we said, we know that Mars has been hit before. We know Earth's been hit. The moon's been hit everything i mean the moon is one of our best examples we just look at it you see craters everywhere because it doesn't have an environment or an atmosphere the moon was built by a huge impact between earth and mars like body you know at the beginning of the planet's history so yeah those happen all the time i think if you get advanced you know so like we are on the lip of being a multi-planet species, right? And once you do that, which means you become a space faring race, then I think like

certainly the asteroid stuff you can take care of, right? We've already done, we've identified like a huge fraction of all the earth crossing asteroids. Like we're not really sure what to do about them if we find one coming at us. But we see some coming at us all the time where they just recognize them a few hours before they're near. Right, right. That happened a couple weeks ago. Right. And, you know, luckily it always, you know, it passes. You can, I mean, like, so. Yeah.

So we couldn't really, like, you know, we're young enough now that if we discovered one heading right towards us, we could just, you know, put your legs between your, you know, your head between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye. But in time, right, 200 years from now, we will have done a much better job of mapping out all the major rocks. Yeah. Well, I think so. I mean, I'm really –

You think so? I mean, if we have that kind of interplanetary – we're going to be mapping them out just because you don't want to run into them or you're going to be mining them. What do you think is promising in terms of the ability to prevent impacts? There's a couple of things. I think the best one, if you catch it early enough, there's the gravity tug where you just literally park a spaceship next to it and slowly have the spaceship move. Because all you have to do is alter the trajectory a little bit.

You just really have to tap on it. Because shit in space is just so vast that a little tap will make it miss. So the gravity tug, you don't have to try and do the... What was it? What was the movie Apocalypse? The one from the 90s with the space miners? Oh.

Armageddon. Armageddon. Yeah, thank you. And then there was a Deep Impact too. Deep Impact was the smart one. Yeah, Armageddon was the dumb one. But they rip each other's off, right? Because they both came out

at the same time. I know. I think Deep Impact came out first, but it was developed second. Yeah, yeah. That'd be a bummer to be in the one that like, you know,

they both come out at the same time and your movie doesn't get any attention and the other one becomes like a massive hit you know yeah well so uh so like you know there they drilled holes and stuff and you try and blow them up but then the problem there is you now have a bunch of rocks and if some of those rocks are big enough so i think the gravity tug is kind of probably the the best idea but you know because of um uh mining asteroids will probably you know those little ones may be the easiest to mine. What are you worried about more than anything in terms of climate change? Are you worried about the rising of the ocean levels?

Are you worried about the heating of the actual planet? The temperature being unsustainable for human life? What are you worried about the most? The one thing I worry about the most, like we were talking before, you know, technological societies are these like overlaid networks, you know, you got the transportation network, you got the energy network, you got social networks, you know, and those are really complex. And so I do a little, what's called network theory. And what you find with network theory is that you, you know, you may have an individual network that's pretty robust, meaning like I can cut some of the

connections. Like you got your social network. I could take 20% of the people out of your social network and the social network will still function. You know, like most people will still talk to each other or anything. But once you start layering them, so the social network is now connected to the telecommunications network, which is connected to the energy network, blah, blah, blah. Then you can ripple a small change, ripples through the whole thing and blows it apart.

It just doesn't function anymore. So, you know, I don't need like apocalypses to have the fabric of technological civilization fall apart. Like, so if the, if just the weather patterns change enough, that agriculture becomes really hard, you know, we're used to the rains falling pretty much the same way they do yearly and everything that, you know, like we talk about, you look at what the, you know, like refugees, how much, you know, the trouble, you know, having a huge influx of refugees can cause. Climate change is going to have people moving all over the planet because now they can't grow food anywhere. So it's like, I don't, you know, like I said, you don't need, I do worry like ocean rise is going to be huge. Most people live in coastal cities.

Most of the wealth in the world is in coastal cities. But you don't really need too much to like really shift the weather patterns and then the thing you're used to falls apart now when you factor in human beings and our evolution from primitive hominids to what we are today and you sort of extrapolate and keep going and think about what we're going to be in the future and then think about what these creatures might be that live a hundred million light years away or whatever the fuck it is yeah what i mean we've got i've got to think that whatever is holding us back our primitive instincts these human reward systems that were engaged when we were running away from wild animals and fighting off tribes

of invaders that slowly but surely those are going to either evaporate or evolve and we're going to get to a point where we can be more rational about complex issues if we do do that like what is the motivation for expanding the human race isn't sustaining the human race. Isn't sustaining the human race in a healthy way on this planet a better option than traveling to Mars or traveling to other solar systems? Wouldn't we be better served trying to achieve some sort of a balance here on this planet? I think one serves the other. You look at the human migration patterns from when we started, right. You know, we started off as a, you know,

a bunch of people in Africa, maybe a few thousand. Right. And then you see this, you know, uh, migration, like, or, you know, it's not a bunch of us, like a few hundred cross the red sea, which was pretty low at the time. And then it's like, they just worked their way around the coast, you know, took boats over to Australia, went all the way back around through. We're explorers, man. It's really, I think, something fundamental for us psychologically to have these frontiers. Exactly. That's my question, though.

Will we evolve past that? Well, I don't think that's a bad thing. You don't think so? Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's a bad thing. Because, again, this goes back to the biosphere. This is kind of like I think there's something deep in life that wants more life right so if we call you know settle mars right then it's not going to be really us settling

mars it's going to be the earth's biosphere right i mean really right that's what we are we're the agent of the biosphere right and you know the biosphere started off as like you know single celled creatures in like little tiny parts of the planet and then, you know, conquered the oceans. And then eventually when they were – you know, because in the beginning, there weren't continents. The Earth was a water world when we started off. And so when, you know, there was enough continents, you know, then they took over the – life took over the land. I think it's just kind of – life may be kind of like a cosmic force if I can get all woogly on you, you know? So if we do go to Mars, it will essentially be ultimate panspermia.

Yes, exactly. Right, yeah. In that way, right. Panspermia, which is always a weird mars it will essentially be ultimate panspermia yes exactly right yeah in that way right panspermia which is a we're always a weird word you can like panspermia well it's just because people are they feel weird about sperm sperm right i know whenever i give an academic talk i'm like panspermia i know it's a strange when you say sperm in front of people they're like you piece of shit yeah right it's like no no it's a scientific term man i swear it doesn't matter it's like saying niggardly yeah right it's a very very difficult word to say even though it has nothing to do with the n word yeah so um uh you know i think i think it's part of life i think life wants more life and this is the question you're raising about like what do we look like

in a million years what happens to a species that become and you know now we're in the realm of science fiction but yeah that's all cool um you know like what might we become like the gods in some sense do you think that this is my theory and i've thrown this out so many times people are sick of it but i think that what we're looking at when we see these archetypal aliens with the big heads and the big eyes and the tiny bodies and no genitals i think we think this is what we're eventually going to be. No genitals? Yeah. Really? That sucks. I think we're going to move past that.

Oh, man. I'll see you and your panspermia. Yeah, right. And I'll raise you some genital-less aliens. Typical males talking about gender. This is the problem with science. This is why we need diversity. I just think that if we could get we so those are archetypes kind of

built into us in some sense that we're moving pat like well what did we used to be well we used to be monkeys right and what are we going to be well we're going to be that thing yeah that thing that can levitate things with its mind that thing that communicates telepathically that thing that has this uh incredible ability to map out the cosmos and create wormholes and super advanced intellect to the point where we can't even comprehend. So like if you think about how what, you know, we evolved from at one point in time, we split from mollusks like what, something million years ago it's got to be on it's got to be past the cambrian explosion but you know it's like yeah 300 400 i don't know yeah

but so a while ago how how much does a squid understand about cell phone networks and whether or not sprints you know unlimited data plan is really any good they don't well we'll extrapolate that to what this alien creature is going to be in terms of its understanding of time and space and matter versus ours we are this crude thing that's weirded out by the word sperm whereas it is telepathically communicating with a universal language and it has this unbelievable ability to manipulate matter. And they've achieved homeostasis with their environment. They no longer have this. Well, that's one of the things about, you know, there's the Fermi paradox, right? Yeah.

Like, why haven't we seen? So, you know, as I already said, we haven't looked enough to say that we haven't seen evidence of life. Right. It's like opening your door and going, well, where are all the buffalo? Yeah. You got to go to Wyoming, bro. But, you know, there is a kind of a a problem with because we're just doing a paper on this now you know part of the fermi paradox let's get i

don't want to go too far on this because we can come back circle back later um i like it so yeah paradox is fascinating it is right so that so the the idea that we had to people okay so the fermi paradox is the idea that like uh you know, if there's, if the paradox part is like, if you're telling me that intelligence is common, it evolves everywhere, then why don't I see it already? Right. So the, the, if you're asking about like, why don't we see signals from that? I've already answered that.

Right. Cause we just, we haven't looked yet. So that's, yeah. But part of his question, and this was done by a guy in heart. I mean, you know, so Fermi was just, this happened over a conversation for lunch, you know, 1950. So he just posed, he said, where are they all? But in 1975, a guy named Hart wrote a paper where he really mapped out, here's the main problem. Even if you're traveling at a tenth of the speed of light, if you manage to build like world ships that can travel across the stars, you know, and you're traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light.

the stars, you know, and you're traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light. In, you know, if you do that and you hop from one star to the other, build another ship, hop to the next one, in about 600,000 years, you have covered the whole galaxy, right? So 600,000 years sounds like a long time, but it's a tiny part of the galaxy's history. Galaxy's 10 billion years old. So in that case, like why, you know, then every, if, you know, just one species has to do that and they can cover the galaxy. So why aren't there – why don't we see the colony ships here, right? That's a much harder version of the Fermi paradox to get around.

Is it though because if we did – look, we're already sending robots to Mars, right? We're not going to Mars yet, but we're sending robots there. What if we decide that there's no real benefit in sending biological entities into space and that the dangers of radiation and astro-orbital impacts, this is just too great. It's far better to send something. I mean, look at what we're capable of doing now in terms of projection of video. We can take a cell phone video and you can send it to your friend in New Zealand and they can get it almost instantaneously. You don't have to go to New Zealand. You don't have to go there. Do a Skype call with them.

Right. If we can get some sort of 3D virtual reality imaging of these planets, like, hey, man, do you want to see what it's like on Pandora? Here, put these goggles on and you will go wherever you want that robot to go and you'll be there. Yeah, right. And maybe it'll get to the point where you can actually smell it and touch it and feel

it and but not be compromised by its environment in terms of your biology. Well, that's actually a huge point. So that's one of the things we're looking at in this paper is the idea that, you know, good planets may be hard to find. You know, there's this great novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's like just for me, one of the great science fiction writers. And it's called Aurora. And, you know, it's the usual world ship thing.

So they build the colony ship. It takes, you know, three generations to cross space. And they get to the planet. And the planet sucks. It looked like it was going to be good, you know. But there's like prions, tiny, super small biological shit that just makes you can't live there. And then you're going back, right? So it's like it may be exactly like you're saying that, you know, we think like, oh, you just land on a planet.

You terraform it. And, you know, you just turn it into habitable. And it's like that may not work. And maybe it does, but that's a science fiction idea. So, right, it's entirely possible. I mean, there's a lot of possible solutions, which is just that, you know, one of which is space travel is really hard and interstellar. Not interplanetary, but interstellar travel is really hard and really expensive. I was just reading a paper on this where the guy estimated that in order to get like, say you wanted to have a thousand people on a world ship to get to another star,

that would take the economy, you'd need like, I think it was like a hundred thousand Earth economies to build that. You know what I mean? Jeff Bezos, are you listening? By the time we're ready, you might have a hundred thousand Earth economies. But it was just like, it was so much that,

like, you know, unless you were, he said, you know, with the conclusion he came to, unless you were a multi-planet species, if you were like a – if you had conquered the entire or settled the entire solar system, maybe you'd have an economy that big. So one possible solution is good planets are hard to find and, you know, it's just too expensive. It really costs a lot. And so, yeah, it's not really worth, you know, the effort. You know, you send out some probes once in a lot. And so, yeah, it's not really worth the effort. You send out some probes once in a while, but it's not. Well, there's also finding an environment that's not just habitable but stable. I mean, our environment is habitable, but look what's going on in Hawaii right now.

There is a 400-year-old lake that evaporated in a matter of hours. It's the biggest lake on the Big Island. It's gone, which is such a tragedy. But it's not. It's not. It's just what happens. Because it's also magnificent. You watch that lava roll into that lake and say, that's a wrap, kids.

No more lake, you fucks. And it really shows you the power of a planet, too, right? I mean, of the forces at work. What makes continents. I mean, it made the island in the first place. You can't be upset at it. It's still billowing off. It is what made the island, and it's continuing to make the island bigger.

Right. Yeah, right. Exactly. Oh, you're crying about your house, but now you got more real estate. So shut up. It's making the island bigger and it's always done that. It's been doing that for millions of years. It's a fascinating place. If you've been- I've been. And I've seen the, I went to the park. Did you do the helicopter thing? No. Oh man, you got to do the helicopter thing.

It's crazy because you fly over the volcanoes, but you can't now because it's too crazy. But I did it a few years back and you could watch the lava go into the ocean. Yeah. And you see these lava vents pour this red, hot fucking, it's like, it's glowing. Yeah. And it's going into the ocean. During the day. I saw that part.

We went to the park to see it. Then when you go to that volcano park, there's just vents where steam's coming out, like New York City with the manholes. You're like, what the fuck? That's just from this heat coming up from the bottom of the planet. Are you scared about Yellowstone? What was that movie, 2012?

Nah. Because that's what made the what was that movie, 2012? Nah. Yeah. Like where that, because that's like such a, that's like a, you know, that's what made the Adirondacks, right? What was the 2012 movie? I never saw that. With Kuda. Day After Tomorrow, Day Before Tomorrow. No, no, no, no, no.

It was a climate change movie. It was John Cusack. It's actually a pretty good movie. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's another like Destroy the Planet. Those guys who made that. Hold on, stop right there. That was not a pretty good movie.

That movie sucked. I thought it was good. That movie was so stupid. No, it was stupid. It was totally stupid. They constantly missed disaster by inches with cars. They never got a flat. They always got away from the world caving in behind them.

Dude, totally believable, man. Oh, yeah, man. Like, super believable. Yeah, no. I thought it was. Well, Yellowstone is a caldera. It's a super volcano. And they're experiencing thousands of earthquakes a year.

Yeah, and that eventually, you could get one this. Yeah, well, every 600,000 to 800,000 years, it's a continent killer. The last time it blew was 600,000 years ago. Yeah. So why aren't you scared? I don't know. I just don't think about it, man. I'm fucking thinking about it every day, man.

I'll smoke a joint. I think about it once a month. I think about Yellowstone. Really? About Yellowstone? Yeah. So I just say, no, I should. Okay, I'm going to add that to my list of things I'm freaking out about. I have friends in Australia, and that's? I should okay I'm gonna add that to my

list of things I'm freaking out about. I have friends in Australia and that's where I'm going. Yeah because there's nothing. Fly over just start driving on the left-hand side. It's probably the only thing you can go to. I worry more about Seattle. I lived in Seattle for a while you know and they said the super earthquake that they're looking at that's going to turn the whole thing into jello right you get an earthquake so bad that the ground just literally becomes porous. Is it really that scary there? Yeah, they're predicting, because, you know, Seattle's got like, I mean, I don't know that much about this. I'm way out of my,

I'm in the danger zone. The plates are super deep, you know, so you don't get as many tremors, but, you know, when it releases, it's going to, you know, it's just be a super powerful earthquake, and, you know, it'll be so powerful, yeah, that they said that, like, there's not going to be a lot even even with the earthquake proofing there's

not gonna be a lot of left standing Jesus oh yeah yeah Seattle you must be I mean because you're here right you feel tremors they must say they happen all the time right I've only been a few times when I'm all the time I felt them before the the biggest ones I ever felt was when I first moved here I first moved here in 94 and it was right after the Northridge earthquake. And I was in my house and I felt, I guess it was like a 5.5 where the whole thing just, it was weird. It gave me the impression that the house that I was living in or the apartment that I was in was made out of the same stuff, like a box that a refrigerator would come in. You know how you kind of move it around.

Yeah, you can go and play inside. The whole thing was just moving like easily left and right. I was like, holy shit. Well, that was my, I've only had a few times that I've, you know, felt it. I'm like, it's like, it's, you know, at first I thought it was a truck. I thought a truck was rolling by. You know, and I'm like, and somebody's like, no, man, that was an earthquake. And the one that I experienced was nothing.

I mean, it was a baby one. The ones that they're getting, you know, right now somewhere in the world. I mean, there's always something that's like a five or six. Yeah. So this goes back to your point about the, you know, a lot of planets, right, will be like way more plate tectonically active. Volatile. Yeah, than ours. So, you know, I mean, I think good planets are going to be like really hard to find.

Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I think good planets are going to be like really hard to find. So, you know, that may be the solution. The other solution is, you know, I mean, the way you guys found out about it was I did that article about the previous civilization. You know, like how do you know whether or not there was a previous civilization on Earth? And, you know, one solution could be that, look, they were here, you know, that somebody did arrive and spent some time on Earth. But if it was like half a billion years ago and they only lasted, right, every civilization has a finite lifetime. They only lasted for, you know, even a few hundred thousand years.

They wouldn't leave. There'd be no record left. There'd be nothing left. There'd be nothing left. Do you think that's possible that something's ever visited here? Because that is the big question. And that's the thing that gets the UFO dorks more jazzed up than anything is the possibility that we've been visited. Yeah, I'm definitely not UFOs.

I have two arguments against UFOs. One is, as a friend of mine, Jason Wright, says, it's like, look, as astronomers, man, we're finding all those asteroids. We're finding little chunks of rock moving. Nobody looks at the sky harder than we do, right? And, you know, if anything anything unless you want to go to conspiracy theories we would have found something my other argument is like what's with the headlights you know i mean people always like oh man i saw lights in the sky and then they moved around and then

they disappeared you know but they don't really want to be seen i'm like well why do they have headlights on like why just turn off the freaking lights it just why would they have lights in the first place why do they have lights like what you know you came from another civilization and you can't get around without your high beams you know the idea is what the fuck are you seeing with those lights? Right. You're not seeing shit. Yeah. When was the last time you saw, I mean, planes have lights so other planes don't run into

them. They don't have lights so they could see where they're going. Yeah. So what? So why do they have, right, exactly. The planes have lights so other people can see them. So if they're here, but they're mysterious, they don't want to be found, then turn off the fricking lights.

Well, yeah, they wouldn't have any lights. Yeah. They always have lights. Yeah. That is true. That's right. People are always seeing like. Well, yeah, they wouldn't have any lights. Yeah, they always have lights. Yeah. That's true. People are always saying, like, oh, man, I saw lights in the sky, and then they move back and forth. Well, this is also a problem with human memory.

Memory is horrible. Yeah. And memory of events that are stunning or shocking or unnerving or you think you saw something. Right. They've done all that research, even in trials, right, where people see things. So I just do UFOs. You know, I'm where people see things. So I just do UFOs.

But you think it's possible that there could be life on other planets, and it's possible there could be intelligent life on other planets, and we send probes to Mars. Why wouldn't – and I think that if they do send something here, they're going to send something without biological life inside of it. Yeah. You know what's a really interesting question is like we're talking about like what will we evolve into in a million years? It may be possible that biology is a short period of intelligence. Yes. You build machines and the machines become – you download yourself into them. I mean that's a real possibility that like silicon makes a lot more sense than wetware. Well, the problem is we think of artificial intelligence as artificial.

Right. It's definitely real. Right. Yeah, no, that's exactly it of artificial intelligence as artificial. It's definitely real. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. It's not fake. It's right there. It's like there's artificial milk. You know what I mean? But it's a liquid. It's an actual liquid. There's not an artificial life. It's just

silicon-created life. And that's, again, the idea that the biosphere, this may be what the biosphere's solution to spreading itself, you know, to getting it maybe that, like, yeah, silicon, that's again the idea that the biosphere this may be what the biosphere solution to spreading itself, you know? To getting it maybe that like, yeah, silicon, that's kind of a normal phase. I mean, I am super skeptical about like the whole

transhuman thing about we're going to download ourselves into computers. Have you ever gone to one of those conventions and talked to those dorks? There's some pretty serious dorking going on there. Well, there's geniuses in those dorks too. It's really interesting. It's like they're fully, wholly committed to this prospect of downloading themselves.

Have you talked to Kurzweil before? No, but I've read his stuff. I had a chance to interview him a few years back for Sci-Fi. He's super smart. That dude is like super smart. But God damn it, he committed to it. And then when you get to it, you realize that what he actually wants to do

is recreate his father. Yeah, his father died when he was young and he wants to be able to through memories and photographs and what he knows about his father literally recreate his father and have a be able to have a conversation with him yeah he was talking about this right right but what he's doing is he's going way, way into the future, into the possibilities of, he's not seeing like, well, five years from now, we're going to be able to send, you know, gigabyte pictures to the mail. No, he's saying, let's think of if you keep going exponentially and electronics and technology and innovation keeps continually accelerating, electronics and technology and innovation keeps continually accelerating, we could potentially get to the point where it's the impossible. Well, you would be able to recreate human beings based

on your knowledge of them, and they'll be able to come up with some sort of a program where he'll be able to have a conversation with his father. Yeah. See, I think that misunderstanding, I mean, I think it's true about the possibility of a singularity in technological development, but it's not going to be his father. That's the sad thing. I think we seriously – I've done some work on this as an interest of mine about mind. What is mind? What does the relationship between mind and matter?

And I think we have a serious misunderstanding. We don't understand consciousness very well at all. So the idea that like, oh, yeah, it's just going to download your you know your consciousness into a computer i think it's pretty you know there's like a shitload of assumptions in there about like what mind is and the relationship between like your neurons and you know awareness yeah so that's why i think those guys it's a little bit of a religion you know what i mean it is a little bit of religion transcend and you know so it's like well 2045 is the new benchmark for whatever reason that's the new number they're going back it's gonna be like every other you know every other rapture oh we thought

it was 2045 we really meant 2065 you know we went to this 2045 conference me and my friend ari and duncan and we got to talk to some of these guys and it's really fascinating and one of them had created some robot that was supposed to be him, but it didn't work well. So they never revealed it at the conference. It had too many bugs in it. Yeah, yeah. But it's intriguing. It's like I want them to keep going.

Because, I mean, when are we going to get to Ex Machina? When are we going to get to – Talk about good movies, though. Did you like that one? One of my favorite movies ever. So smart. So just like simple. Perfect.

He's not beating you over the head with it. No cut the shit moments in that movie. Yeah, no were like whoa the entire i think that's one of my all-time like top 20 movies when she stabs him just emotionless just like i'm putting the blade in it was amazing yeah amazing yeah spoiler alert yeah right did you like uh annihilation yes yes i didn't like it as much but i I liked it. It was very weird. And the ending seemed like some producers put their jizz in the soup. Back to Pittsburgh. Yeah.

What's happening here? Who made this part? Yeah. But I enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think like, you know, I mean, and the danger with anything when it comes to AI. So here's an interesting thing about AI.

Like we are getting, making amazing strides with AI. Now, artificial intelligence is different from artificial consciousness. You know what I mean? So like, but the AI that, you know, what we're getting out of it is nothing like us. Right. So the, you know, back in the day where people were like, oh, we're going to like model the human brain and that's how we'll do it. We'll like make programs that are what, and what they've learned is like, oh, that doesn't really work that well. So now this is the whole big data thing, like, you know, network theory and big data and deep learning where like, you know, they're using statistical, you know, the power of having huge

amounts of computing and statistical reasoning so that like, you know, yeah, the computer, like, you know, it'll find the picture of the cat, but you have no idea why it found the, it didn't reason like, oh yeah, that sort of looks like cat and I like cats. You know, it was just like, oh, these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing. It didn't reason like, oh yeah, that sort of looks like cat and I like cats. You know, it was just like, oh, these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing. It has no idea what it's doing, but it'll act intelligently.

And so that's, you know, I mean, that's kind of freaky deaky in a lot of ways too. I think people are, I think it's smart to think about the dangers

of AI, not necessarily when it takes over. Well, the dangers to us. Yeah. Not necessarily the dangers, just the dangers to this thing that we are this weird monkey thing yeah that wants to keep being a monkey thing yeah well you mean in

the sense of like right that it's going to replace us yes yeah yeah i think it's inevitable i mean don't you think that if you go back and interview the single-celled organism before it branched off into multi-cell that'd be kind of a boring interview fuck this multi-celled. That'd be kind of a boring interview. Fuck this multi-celled bullshit. I want to stay a single cell at the bottom of the ocean. These guys are assholes, man, with their rock and roll music. They're going to make cars? Fuck that. I don't want a car, man.

I like staying down here. There's a real thought to that, that we are the wetware that is the problem. Yeah. No, no, listen. I think it's fully conceivable. Like, I'm not going to be like, it'll never happen. But as a guy knows, a philosopher says, you know, there's a certain way in which everything we do with AI right now, it's not like, you know, Watson is playing chess.

It's like we're using Watson to play chess. It's our tool, you know? And I think the fear is the tool gets out of hand. Not that it like develops a thing where like, I hate humans, you know, dad, I hate you. But more that it's like, you know, these things which are not actually thinking, they act intelligent, but they're not thinking, can have a huge like, it'll have a really negative impact. You know, it'll, you know, what is it?

There's that example of like, if you design something that is an AI system to make paper clips, it ends up consuming the entire planet making paper clips because that's what you told it to do. Right. You never told it to make a sustainable amount of right exactly so i'm more worried about that than i am of like skynet you know coming over and like you know deciding that's gonna you know take drop all the bombs on us because it needs to get rid of us well there's no biological imperative for a silicon-based artificial intelligence to procreate to keep

going and move forward like why would they do? We do it because we came from biology, and biology needs to stay alive. And everybody wants bigger, faster, stronger. You want to keep moving. And it's because there's a real possibility that you might get consumed by some other life form. So you have to protect yourself, and you have to look out for other people who might want to breed with the viable female that you've copulated with. Right.

There's a lot of shit that's going on. Yeah. It's built in evolutionarily to have that. Right. That we assume that somehow or another these artificial creations will have as well. Right. Which is why, right? I mean, yeah.

Why? Unless we program it in. So the thing is like, but will it wake up? So that's the other thing. Even if it does wake up, will it have the inclination towards scientific research? Would it even want to send something

through the cosmos to view us? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a really interesting, you know, and I think we just don't know, right?

If it actually, because listen, we understand so little about what consciousness is and what its imperatives are. Like, yeah, once you wake up,

you're like, oh, you're dead, you know, dead. I got to kill. I mean, like,

why? Like, who knows what really, did you like Battlestar Gal're dead. You know? Dead, I gotta kill. I mean, like, why? Like, who knows what really... Did you like Battlestar Galactica? I loved Battlestar Galactica. How goddamn good was that new... That show. The new version.

Yeah, no, the new version. I gotta say, I love the old version because I was... Yeah, I was 14 years old and I was like, yeah, spaceships. But the new version was amazing. So smart. If there is a show that I wish they would bring back, it's Battlestar Galactica. Yeah, yeah. Goddamn, that was good.

What'd you think about the ending, though? It was, you know, they had to end it. It was all right. Yeah. But the fucking series was brilliant. It was brilliant. You know what was amazing about that? The way they wrapped, like, all the political shit that was happening after 9-11 into that,

man. From, like, the torture scenes to the... Yeah, man, it was so... And then they even had the whole thing with Starbuck about, you know, what was she? Yeah. I thought that was a... You know, there was a couple, like, it was so... And then they even had the whole thing with Starbuck about, you know, what was she? Yeah. I thought that was a... You know, there was a couple, like, it was five years, right? And there were a couple seasons where, like, it kind of got a little ran off the rails.

That girl, what's her name? Katie Sackhoff? Is that her name? Who plays... Starbuck? Yeah. Is that her name? Yeah.

She's so good. Yeah, she was really good in that role. Being both, like, tough and then also... I haven't seen her in stuff since. She's got a movie out right now on Netflix. I haven't seen it, right? But I'm sort of like, oh, yeah, there's, you know... But she had, right, she sort of disappeared after that. She was been doing stuff since. She's got a movie out right now on Netflix. I haven't seen it, right? But I'm sort of like, oh yeah, there's, you know. But she had, right,

she sort of disappeared after that. She was so good in that show. I was like, well, this is like the launching pad for her. Yeah, yeah. And you know what's revolutionary about that show too?

The way they did the special effects were like, you know, oh, the camera moved around. Like, there's a spaceship, but I'm, you know, I don't have, it didn't do, you know, sometimes it did those long pans,

but it kind of opened up a whole new way of sort of looking at, you know, just sort of what it looks like to be in space and stuff. Yeah. But it really scared the shit out of people in terms of artificial life. Something that we create that decides it's done with us and it's taking over. Well, you know, what's amazing about that? And this is, I've written about this, this idea that like, you know, we keep telling that story over and over again.

How many movies, you know, can you think of that have that? And I think like, so I'm really interested in myth, right? You know, the whole, you know, mythology, the way like, you know, we can never get away from the myths, you know, coming of age, the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell. Yeah, Joseph Campbell, big Joseph Campbell fan. But like, you know, what's happening with us now, we got, there's nothing in the storehouse of myth to take care of like building machines that take over, right? So the reason we keep telling that story over and over again is we're preparing ourselves, right? We're building the myths, you know, that sort of will help.

We don't know what's going to happen, but we have to keep telling that story because we can feel it coming. You know what I mean? Yeah. So we need to keep telling that story to kind of explore what the options are. And I like, that's what I liked about the ending. And, you know, I didn't think the ending was great. But the idea that like, oh, yeah, this yeah this balance you know you get to keep going through these cycles of trying to achieve this balance between you know silicon forms and non-silicon and

biological forms but um well we're not we're worried that we're going to be taken over by something else but we're not overly concerned with evolving our own biology I know and changing and maybe that's the solution in terms of our physical limitations is some sort of a symbiotic connection between us and technology that instead of artificial technology and artificial life taking over, usurping us, instead of that, maybe we become a part of it and it becomes a part of us. I mean, you have glasses on.

You can see better with those glasses. That's essentially... Cyborg. Yeah. Right. And these things, these cell phones, my God, my memory's in there. I used to know cell phones. I left my house two days ago without my phone, and I turned around in a panic on my own street. I'm like, where's my fucking phone?

I was like, no. Do you remember when you used to have phone numbers in your head? Oh, yeah. You know? You'd have 20 phone numbers. I know three numbers. My wife's number, I can't. I got three digits out of it i can't go further than that it's crazy yeah it's crazy we're but we remember a lot of other stuff now i mean you have so much i mean

i'm i'm really overwhelmed i think i'm in that weird zone where i just don't have i don't i don't have enough data space i I don't have enough storage. Yeah. Yeah. For all of us, that's, you got to kind of pick and choose, right. Sort of, you know, and there's just like, well, like Wikipedia, we're all human knowledge. The entire sum of human knowledge is right there. You know, I mean like, whoa, what a freaking, I mean, talk about changes, right. That you were talking about. What an amazing change that you can have pretty much, you know, like, you know, I, you know, I love comics, right? You know, I was a comic Marvel guy way back, right?

And back in the day, you know, you paid for your, you had to, you know, first of all, you got your ass kicked. But, you know, you have to go to the store every week and get the comics and, you know. And now, you know, you just look up Captain America and you can know everything there was about his, you know, his origin story and everything. So it's like that idea that, like, there's no domains of knowledge that you can't instantly access and have all the backstory that you need. That's got to be it. Physical comic books are amazing, but I have to be honest, comic books on an iPad are better because you don't see the next frame.

Yeah. You just swipe and then you get the next frame. You don't see it in advance. If you're reading the left side of Doctor strange and the right side is an explosion like well i see that i see that shit's coming next yeah like it's kind of a shitty way to do it no i agree i have an ipad it's fucking amazing it's amazing yeah no and you do that thing and now with the it's like embarrassing as a you know professor of physics at a major university i have like three thousand dollars worth of comic books but why is that embarrassing no No, it's not embarrassing.

It can't be. No, no, it's not. You're still a brilliant guy, but you just also like cool shit. Yeah, well, shouldn't I be reading like Dostoevsky or something? I don't know. You know, it's from like, you know, my dad was, my dad was always like, Dostoevsky, because my dad was a writer. He was like, oh, comic books, you know.

But I was like, Dad, I'm learning, especially with Marvel, right? Marvel had great language, right? I learned the word synopsis from Marvel, you know? Especially like, you know, some of the like, Doctor Strange had some great shit. You know, Fantastic Four. I didn't. Yeah, no, the Doctor Strange. You know, I was the science advisor for Doctor Strange.

For the movie? For the movie, yeah. Were you really? Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. Best day ever. Did you have to correct anything? No, no, not really, because they called me in.

So I know Scott Derricks. I actually had lunch with, or breakfast with Scott yesterday. I know Scott from my first book, which is about science and religion. You know, so, you know, and we got somebody, you know, connected us and we've been talking for a long time. And when he got tapped to do Doctor Strange, he contacted me. Like I said, you know, email said Marvel wants to talk to you. I was like, oh, thank you. And, you know, I got out there for a day.

I met Kevin Feige, man. It was just like, oh, man. And so we basically worked on, he wanted to work on two things for that. And what's funny here is I never read Doctor Strange, right? Because I was like a science guy. It was all about Tony Stark. Sure. You know, or Spider-Man or the X-Men.

So I never, I was like, oh, that guy uses magic. So the thing we had to figure out was, first of all, that scene where he first encounters the Ancient One, you know, and she has to kind of like, you know, school him on there's more ways to think about the world than science. And then the multiverse. That was the other thing. Because I've written a lot on the multiverse. But, man, it was awesome. It was so much fun to be in the writer's room, you know, with them and just like be throwing around ideas. Wow.

Yeah. No. And it'll probably never, ever happen again. But I don't i don't care you know i don't care i got my shot that you know it is a weird thing that when you're young you like all this cool stuff but then when you get old you're supposed to be more pragmatic you're supposed to abandon that stuff and be mature but when i was a kid i was super embarrassed when i became an adult that i still like muscle cars yeah i was like why do i like these stupid things? And I love them. I would see one drive by and hear the rumble and go, ooh.

That's awesome. Look at that thing. And then when I became an older adult, I was like, who gives a fuck? That's really what it is. That's where I'm now. Like, who cares, man? You know, because I love video games. I play a lot of video games.

And people are always like, oh, my God, why are you playing video games? You dork. They're terrible. They're for children. Yeah, they're awesome, man. There is no better way to kill an hour, especially after a stressful day, than to go and shoot aliens. You know, I mean, this is like, you know. And it stimulates the mind.

I mean, Jamie and I have talked about this many times that we have this deep appreciation for chess and for Go and all these ancient games. But there are games like Starcraft and even like one-on-one Quake matches that require intense calculating. You have to think about the environment and understanding of the map that you're competing in. There's a lot of strategy. No, that's what's really good about it. I mean, I tend to be – I do a lot – I really like RPGs, you know, with a map and everything. Oh, you're one of them EverQuest dorks. Well, I don't do anything multiplayer, right?

Because I'm so bad at it that, like, I know there's some kid, some 13-year-old in Korea who's just like, you're dead, you're dead, spawn, die, spawn. But I like something with a really good story, you know? What's the game you like? Oh, God, my favorite game is Last of Us. Oh, what is that? Oh, man, Last of Us. It is fucking awesome.

Because I don't like zombie games because I get scared you know you get scared every set when i i saw um what about plants versus zombies that's a nice simple one yeah right that might work uh no i saw the um night of the living dead when i was like 12 it was on pbs little screen and it's just like after that i'm sorry zombies wow yeah it was i can't believe they put it on Like, you know, it was like the 11 o'clock show. So, but Last of Us is kind of a zombie survival story. But it's beautiful. I mean, it's really the narrative of it. It's this guy, you know, it's 20 years after.

And the thing about this thing, it opens up with the zombie outbreak happening. And the guy loses his daughter. Like, you see him lose his daughter. And it's so well. It's the same company that did Uncharted, which are other, I really liked those as well. Um, and so it's just like the acting in it was really beautiful. And then, you know, it's 20 years later and this guy's broken. You know what I mean? Like he's just, he's a, you know, he survived in this, you know, the society's falling apart. Um, but, uh, you know, he just, you, you track him as he gets this,

this young girl who is immune. And he's got to take her cross-country. And you're following this guy's story. And then there's zombies. Isn't that the theme of a movie? A really recent movie, wasn't it? Oh, that was... Like a foreign movie with a foreign zombie movie that was supposed to be very good.

But that was the idea behind it. Yeah, but it was his own daughter, wasn't it? Or no, maybe it wasn't Schwarzenegger. I bet they took it from this. I bet they did. Because, you know, so Last of Us has won like huge amounts of awards. How old is it? Six years, maybe.

Last of Us 2 is just about to come out. Well, the Schwarzenegger movie is older than that, I believe. Because it came out right around the time where his wife left him because he banged the maid. Oh, yeah. Whoops. Downfall. Whoops. He was the governor then.

Wasn't he the governor? Or was he post-governor? He was post. It was post-post-governor. Yeah. But that theme is a reoccurring theme. That is a reoccurring theme. More than anyone.

Right. How many times does that come back? The plague wipes people out. They come back to life. They're zombies. Yeah. So you got to wonder what's up with that. Like, why is that something that's like stirring around in our head?

I think the apocalypse is because we kind of feel we're nervous about what's happening with us because we can see sort of. Sure. We're pushing up against boundaries. Well, we're also vulnerable. Yeah. Right. And we're vulnerable to disease. Right.

And we're vulnerable to, I mean, there's so many different things that people can get. Rabies. Right. And malaria. And we had plagues. We used to have plagues many different things that people can get. Rabies and malaria. And we had plagues. We used to have plagues all the time, you know? So, yeah, no. But that's what makes this game so great is that it really takes the world after the fall seriously.

And it's heartbreaking. You know what I mean? It's beautifully done. Scarier than shit, but, you know, beautifully done. And for me, it's like everything that I love most in the game. Because like you're saying is you get into these situations and, you know, beautifully done. And for me, it's like everything that I love most in the game. Because like you're saying is, you get into these situations, and you're going to get killed. You know, there's Dark Souls where there's no getting through.

Dark Souls is apparently the most hardest game ever. I've never played it. But, you know, this game is hard, and you've got to keep coming back. What is Dark Souls? Dark Souls is also a story based open world game. Single player. I think this is probably a multiplayer mode. But it's like you know

kind of an elvish you know you're in that kind of world and you're just trying to stay alive trying to stay alive and it's just like the hardest game ever that's what they say um but like you know i said a good hard game you gotta you know you gotta you're gonna keep going back like oh i just died all right let me try let me try coming around from this side you know oh let me use this weapon let me you know and it's it – we did a – I had a textbook that just came out a couple years ago. And we did a video game. We built a full – first ever full video game for an intro astronomy course. And the whole idea was like the coolest thing about a game is like the first thing you have to do is learn the rules, right?

And that's what makes being in a game world – you know, there's a whole set of rules. You've got to know how to craft. You've got to know which weapons to use in different kinds of situations. And our idea with the video game was like, just make the real rules. Make them the science rules, right? Oh, you want to go mine an asteroid?

Well, how do you know which asteroid has, you know, the most, you know, ore in it? You know, I'm just going to do what you're going to normally do in astronomy. So I think like, you know, video games have not recognized,

they haven't, like you said, people don't understand actually how important they are. Yeah. You know, for teaching, for all kinds of things, video games, and for entertainment, you know, for like a future of storytelling, too. Well, people take them, they think it's a waste of time until they find out how much these professionals make. You know, someone was saying that some guy, what is the number that kid was making? $500,000 a month playing Fortnite. Wasn't that what Sean, Sugar Sean was?

That's what he advertised it as, but it's way more than that. He makes more than that? For sure. So what is Fortnite? Can somebody explain Fortnite to me? I'm sorry, I'm still in Far Cry 5 right now. It's a crazy third-person shooter. You're jumping around shooting people.

I'm good with third-person shooters. But is it a story or is it just like you got other people? Just fucking people up, I think. Yeah, the story is really just drop it into survive. Oh yeah. There's no campaign mode or if there is, but that's a separate, that's not whatever. You know what's interesting to me about Fortnite? The graphics suck.

Don't you have me? That's a graphic style that those that, that it has. Yeah, it does. It kind of has like a, like a, uh, an Xbox two. Yeah. Because it does. It kind of has like an Xbox 2 sort of. Somebody had an image, and it was from 2007.

And it said, man, look at this. I wonder what video games are going to be looking like, the graphics are going to be looking like in 2018. And then it shows Fortnite. And it's like, this is like they've turned the textures off. 100%. You turn the textures off when you play online if you don't have a powerful enough computer so that you don't screw up powerful enough computer sure you don't write

Like claiming yeah, so it doesn't make your streaming It doesn't make your video game video card work so hard But also it makes it easier to recognize shapes because they're not is like that was the thing they did with quake They would completely turn the textures off when guys would be like playing in high level matches Yeah And you would just deal with these flat walls and then then the object, the person that you were fighting against, they would stand out in stark contrast. Right, right.

Whereas, you know, otherwise you'd be in this castle wall. You'd have incredible textures on the wall, and you wouldn't be able to see them as easily. It would be distracting. That's one thing I think I love about video games, too, is the scenery. Sometimes I just want to stop and be like, whoa, dude. That's it. The right side has full graphics.

The left side is not. So it depends on what you were actually looking at. Yeah, the right side is reasonable. I mean, it still is a little bit. Wait a minute. That's not much different at all. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I mean, sort of.

The left side is just dark. No, look, there's grass. Yeah, look at the grass. Look how different the grass is. Yeah, but there's still some movement on the ground. It's not flat plain like it is in Quake. Go to Quake 3, no textures. Make a video or pull up a video of that, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is like literal flat walls where people turned everything off. And it got to a point where they weren't allowing it in certain competitions because it makes such a big difference because now you're just like it's a target in front of a blank screen they also you could also replace all of the characters with a larger character like uh like say if you were playing as like this girl it's like is this one it's doing like it's showing the mod in between maybe i'm thinking what is This might even be a new graphic. I'm sorry. I'm a loser. What is Quake? How dare you, you son of a bitch.

No, no, Jamie, pull up Quake, no textures. Pull up Quake, no textures, and then you can watch what it looks like. That is not no textures. That's different. You can see the difference in the colors and things are moving. When they turn off all the textures you you get to see these flat well that's what it looks like right see yeah now that is a way different experience yeah it'll be much easier to see right you can't shadows still exist but all the textures are gone yeah and if you show a video that see if you could find a video that jamie when uh in the videos you see things moving around with no

textures and you realize what an advantage it would be if you were playing someone who's you're constantly dealing with all this visual input. You have all this different shit. High visibility. This isn't Quake 3 though. It's hard to find. Which game is this? Quake Live. Oh, okay. So again, I still gotta ask

what is Quake? I mean, I know I've heard of it, but I've never played it. It's the ultimate firstperson shooter and it's the original one It was originally quake 1 and well there was doom, but it was doom I've heard of like I've even you know there days we did doom didn't they they came out with another didn't they come out with? Another version of doom. Yes, they did and there's another one that's coming out soon But what quake 1 was was these cool maps and you'd run around and shoot each other

and you'd have these death matches. So one-on-one death matches and shoot rockets at each other and shit. And you're seeing it through your perspective. Like, say, if you have a rocket launcher, you see the rocket launcher in front of you.

Oh, so that whole idea of first person. Whoa, what is this one? Oh, this is Quake Champions. This is the newest version. I mean, the graphics are fucking incredible on these things now. They're so exciting. We're setting up a LAN here, a local area network here, where we're going to stream live and play each other.

Excellent. And waste massive amounts of time. Massive amounts of time. I'm sure I'm going to get yelled at. Oh, man. Sometimes I'm sort of like, oh, three hours just went by. Yeah. I was going to go to sleep a little bit.

Oh, well, whatever. Dude, it will suck up your time. It'll suck up. But I can't play. I'm not good enough to play those kinds of things. It's just like spawn, die, spawn, die. No, you can figure out how to do it. You're a smart guy.

How dare you say that? How dare you put the limitations- On myself. Yeah. You can't do that. I'm good with open words. Listen, you just need to learn W with w-a-s-d learn how to move your fingers around now i'm a good guy too i need the consoles are bullshit i know

that's what people say listen you can't get any real accuracy with a console that's your problem but wait how do you do i mean but yeah with the finger the type i mean the console now i'm pretty good i can listen to you how do you learn physics how do you what is that all this fucking i can't do it i don't understand all this science like that All this fucking I can't do it man I'll never make it This is like that movie where you're like you can do it man Yeah it's like Rocky or something

That's right exactly Karate Kid or whatever Has anybody ever done that for video games? There's never been that movie where someone teaches someone how to play a video game? Yeah and they're like

the guy who's a nerd in the beginning and he's like a loser but you know he comes back and he gets the girl Well one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this in particular

is because I am more and more convinced that our future may lie in some artificially created world and that people are more interested and more attracted every day to virtual reality.

Augmented reality, virtual reality. Jamie, what was that game, the one game where there was created worlds i was gonna pull that up earlier and ask it's called no man's sky oh i played that i played that i bought it because of course any space game i'm like right that's boring though it is because you know they have 80 trillion worlds but they're all this they're basically they don't look that

different you know so it's like oatmeal 80 million bottles of oatmeal happening over there it's not like you go there and people are shooting each other and stealing money. No, no. What is better for that kind of... Yeah, right. I mean, it looked like it was beautiful. But what's better is Elite Dangerous. So after this, I was so disappointed in this, I went back and I found Elite Dangerous, which

actually has... And you were just disappointed in this because there was no action. Yeah, there was not. You just ran around and you mined stuff. It was sort of like... It just wasn't... Nothing exciting. There was nothing stuff. It was sort of like, it just wasn't, you know. Nothing exciting. There was nothing exciting.

There was no, you know, there was no, so like I said, I don't usually play sort of these massive multiplayer games. So this is Elite Dangerous? This is Elite Dangerous. And it is, man, the trading or, you know, you can decide like, oh, I want to be a bounty hunter, you know. That's incredible. And it was so rich. I just, I spent, there was like a good six months of my life that I was like, you know, working my way, getting better ships. I became, because you know, who doesn't want to be a bounty hunter, right?

You know what I'm saying? Like that's what everybody's, and this just, this game had, you know, and there's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand people in there, you know, creating the universe. It's evolving. They add storylines. So, you know. Well, we are setting up an HTC Vive here and we're, we, Jamie was. What does HTC Vive?

How dare you? I know, man. It's like, you know... What's that mean, HTC Vive? How dare you? I know, man. It's like, you know, that's it, my PhD, you're done. You call yourself a dork. You call yourself a nerd, you're out of the club. You're not a real nerd.

You'll never not have sex again. It's virtual reality. And it's consumer virtual reality. I've never done the goggles. Oh, boy. I've been waiting. I've been sort of... Well, we tried to get one.

Jamie went out yesterday and looked, they're all sold out., we tried to get one. Jamie went out yesterday and looked. They're all sold out. So we had to order one. And so we're ordering one. We're going to have it set up in here. And the games, I played the games of two years ago. And I'm sure they're way more advanced than they are now. There's a crazy archery game where you're on the top of a castle.

And these little monsters that look like they could be in South Park. They're not like detailed. Right, right. They're kind of cool looking monsters and you shoot at them with bows and arrows and they're trying to invade the castle. But man, it's addictive because you really look down, you see them all around you. You have like a real... So how do you play though?

Is this always been my question about? Like, you know, I sit on my chair and I play my video game. So like, are you... Well, this is it. See, this guy has a thing in his hands and he's moving around. This is like a Star Wars one. Right. And there's a bunch of different ones that I've seen.

So you always got to be standing, right, in some sense. Yes. Does that make it more exhausting? Don't you want to just, like, sit down with a beer and, like – Well, you can, but there's also a boxing one that you get a real workout in. Wow. So it's a game and I played it over Dunkin' South. So I think there's a video of it. But it's a game and I played it over Dunkin's house. I think there's a video of it,

but it's weird because you punch wrong. So like if I'm holding my hands like this, which is I'm holding my hands vertically where my thumbs are up, right? The boxing gloves would be horizontal like they would be if you were punching someone. Yeah. So it doesn't do the turn. No, it's weird. So as you move your hands forward like this, which you really wouldn't punch like that, the punches come out. So they've got to iron that out. That's what I was going to say.

That'll be something that'll work out in time. Yeah, and make the controller rotate the way a fist would. But as you're doing it, you throw real punches, and someone's throwing punches at you. And when they throw punches at you and they hit you, you see a white flash in front of you, which makes you nervous just like real front of you. That's good. Which makes you nervous just like real sparring does.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, and so, like, this question of, like, what are we going to do with virtual reality? Because, like I said, you know, I already, you know, I see huge potential for, like, education in gaming, and that's why we built our game. Yeah, here's, this is me over at Duncan's house. Just don't want anybody to walk by, you know.

I got to go get a beer. Bam. I'm beating this guy up, moving around him. See, that's the thing. I always wonder. Duncan got pissed because that guy was fucking dunking up every day. He's like, dude, how did you beat it? I was like, move around.

Don't stand right in front of that thing. Just punch it in the face. Got to do the rope-a-dope. Well, you got to have footwork and movement. But you can really get a workout with that. I'm not joking. You get exhausted. Yeah.

And you keep going and fight tougher and tougher opponents. Right. Well, you know, that's the question. So talk about haptic suits, where eventually you're going to wear things. I didn't see the – I read the book, but I didn't see the – what was it? The movie that just – Ready Player One? I didn't see it either. I didn't see it. Have you read the book? No. The book's really good. Because the book, but I didn't see the, what was it, the movie that just, Ready Player One? I didn't see it either. I didn't see it.

Have you read the book? No. The book's really good because the book is like full immersion. Like the whole book is about like when virtual reality is it. And so everybody has these suits that, you know, and you're kind of in this ball. You play the game in a ball so you can run and, you know. But in some sense, yes, we're just starting out along these lines. Well, they have these places you can go that they have a warehouse set up and you go inside of it.

And I went through one with my kids and it's a Star Wars one at Disneyland. Dude, it's fucking wild. Yeah, I would totally love that. You go across, you're walking across this platform. Like, they have all these different places where you actually walk through. Yeah. And as you're walking through, you look to the left and to the right and there's fire.

But you feel the heat from the fire. It's fucking crazy. Yeah, so they've got like heaters set up so that blows up and stormtroopers start shooting at you this is it right here what is it called the void the void yeah and um you do this i'm telling you man this is better than any of the rides at disneyland and it's just outside of disneyland in downtown disney so you don't have to pay to get into Disney to get it, but it costs I think it's $35 for a half an hour. It's not cheap, but It's not too bad. It's not too bad. It's fucking awesome. I mean, it is

awesome. So the question is, what happens with all this, right? Future, right? Because, yeah, virtual reality, we're just on the cusp of it, right? We're just beginning to start playing around with these technologies, because people have been saying it for years and it kind of sucked. It was sort of clunky. Well, we used to play Pong, right? That's what I started with, right?

How old are you? I'm 55. Yeah, I'm 50. So I remember Pong. We were excited. I can't believe I'm controlling the TV. I know. I'm making the thing move on the TV.

Or asteroids. Yes. When we flew the- Oh, yeah. It was a Star Wars game. I don't think it was called Asteroids, but you flew through the trench and everything. It was just like fucking wireframe. Yeah. But it was amazing to us at the time. I loved that. I dropped a lot of quarters on Wars game. I don't think it was called Asteroids, but you flew through the trench and everything. It was just like fucking wireframe. Yeah.

But it was amazing to us at the time. I loved that. I dropped a lot of quarters on that game. Sure. So go from that to what you were showing us here with these crazy new space games. Yeah. And then imagine what these, I mean, the Star Wars thing today, the void, is really cool. But you know that it's not real.

Right. But it's cool. Right. But you know it's not real. Well, you're not going to be able to tell it's not real in 20 years. Yeah, right. And how much time are people going to spend there? And you wear a haptic suit, by not real. Right. But it's cool. Right. But you know it's not real. Well, you're not going to be able to tell it's not real in 20 years. Yeah, right. And how much time are people going to spend there? And you wear a haptic suit, by the way, when you do this.

Oh, really? So there's still like pressure. You have a vest on you. And you feel it when you're getting shot. Wow. You feel like... Yeah. And you know, it's funny.

Even with the controller on my crappy PS4, you know, when it vibrates, even that's enough to sort of give you... It's amazing how much the brain sort of picks up on these signals. When you're using the HTC Vive and you draw the arrow back, when it gets to the knocking point, you feel it like, and you release, there's a feeling in your hand releasing the arrow. It's really cool. Yeah.

So what happens when, and you know, right, I can be sort of like, you know, grandpa, but you're like, that's terrible. People should be going out in nature, which I think they should be. They should, for now. But, you know, I always, I'm always aware whenever I'm sort of like, oh shit, this is going to be terrible. I always remember the whole, you can see in like, I think at some point Socrates, you know, 2005 years, 500 years ago, he's like, oh, kids today, they're a whole bunch of,

you know, assholes. Right. So, you know, who knows what we'll do with it? And, you know, hopefully, and maybe it'll help, you know, maybe, I don't know. You know, I mean, I think there's, I don't want to be like, oh, that's terrible, but there clearly are, there's going to be dangers with this. Is this a different game, Jamie? This is a new one.

Oh boy. I'm fucked. I am going to be fucked. Oh, that's wild with the, yeah, just the hands. Yeah. And so you're, you have two little hand controllers and one of would be the arrow, and the other one would be the bow. And you wear them, and that's the haptic part, and there's controllers on them. Well, you feel the arrow vibrating against the riser of the bow as you draw it back, too.

It's really cool. Well, it's funny because we talked about, for the game that we built, which was awesome. It was really a lot of fun to actually go through the process of like, how do you script it? How do you teach people? Because that whole thing, when you're in a good game, right? The first couple hours of a game and you're just learning the basic stuff and you get excited. You're like, oh, this is a cool

world to be in. But I'd be interested to think, at some point, did I try VR for the same thing? Because once you can have people be tactile and they're not just sort of in their head, what else can you do to sort of show them, teach them things, you know? Like glaciers or, you know, I mean.

Oh, for sure. Well, that's another thing in Disneyland. They have a thing called Soaring Over the World that you sit in a chair and you get raised up and there's a giant like IMAX style screen and it flies you over these environments. It's incredible. It's so beautiful.

Right. And different smells are in the air and the different places that you go to. Like when you go over the elephant. Yeah, the elephants, you smell grass and hay. Yeah. And I think that it's just a matter of time. Like as we were talking about before, where biological entities might not be necessary for space travel. You might be able to send a robot, put on a suit, and be able to experience these worlds

in real time. Yeah. Well, so you know the simulation argument? Yes. The philosophy argument? Yes. And so that's a really interesting idea. Should we just run through it for people who don't know it?

Please do. So I forgot who it was. Nick Bostrom? No, maybe not. Brandon Carter? You know, there's this guy, philosopher, who came up with this brilliant argument for why we're probably somebody else's simulation, self-aware simulation. And the idea is like, look, if you get one – you know, we've been talking about like civilizations.

When they get a million years ahead, what can they do? That they're so powerful, they can build computers that can simulate – like fully simulate reality. Where like, you know, just like in The Matrix, you have programs that are self-aware. And so, you know, once they get to that and they start running simulations of the world, right, it's cheaper to run, it's cheap to run simulations. So they just run trillions of them. Right. So the idea is that from that argument, there's more simulated realities than there is the one real reality. So odds are, right, you know, if there's a trillion simulated realities and one real reality, you're probably in a simulated reality.

So are we a – everything – like right now, you and I think this is real. But what we are is an incredibly detailed and we are self-aware programs in a silicon matrix of – so that argument is brilliant. I mean just from the point of view of like numbers, there's lots of reasons to say that's not possible. But it raises this issue of, like, yeah, what is simulation? If you were in a simulation, the whole matrix thing, if you were in a simulation that was that real, how would you know? How could you know? One day we're going to be. If you allow technology to continue, right?

If we keep moving forward in an exponential pace there's going to come a point in time where we have something that's indistinguishable from reality right so how do we know that we're not already in it yeah and once we're in it will we create another reality will we continue to create simulations inside of simulations like fractals i mean fractals exist in nature they exist everywhere in the universe and there's there's also the argument that the atomic structure itself might really be a universe. Right, right. Yeah.

Dude. Which is, dude, that's super stoner talk. But, you know, it's really, I mean, that's why I love science fiction. You know, the explorations of these ideas, you know, I mean, they're way out there. But they're fun exercises. They're fun exercises. And there's a way in which, again, when you think a million, two million years in the future, this is why my, you know, I hate to loop this back to climate change, but just like, God, if we could just make it through, who the fuck knows what we're going to be. Right.

Right. I mean, there's the whole universe. One thing I did like about Interstellar was the idea that like our future selves, which have now become integrated in the very fabric of reality. You know, that's how far you've evolved. You become the laws of physics, that they're kind of opening up the wormhole for us. And so, you know, a million years is so long. Who knows what we can become? And it's just like, you know, don't hold us back.

I'm, you know, I'm not a fan of the people that deny science. But one thing I am a fan of is watching them do it. Like watching monkeys throw shit at the zoo. There's something weird about watching people argue like really obvious right-wing talking points

and most of them, by the way, have no financial interest in climate change one way or the other. They're not the wealthy elite. They're these weirdos that are like vampire familiars. Like they want to be recognized as like an ally of the elite.

They think somehow or another that's going to get them in. That's really what it is. Right. Yeah. And it's like, you know, and again, it's the tribalism. But as you said, it's like watching them do this. And the part that's so frustrating is just that like dude you're using science it's not fair it's not fair that like oh you get like you know you get uh in an accident and you're like oh god

please give me the mri and then you know as soon as your arm heals you're going to be tweeting about how like you know climate change is all bullshit the earth is flat yeah i'm not sure what to do with that right i mean are those guys just like i mean is this something we should like pay attention to or should we just be like okay you know fine know, fine, go ahead, do your thing. Well, I had an interesting conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson about it. And he said, one of the real problems with debating these people is you elevate their profile and they're never going to believe it in the first place. And the reality is there's a mental illness involved in a lot of these people. There's schizophrenics's there's something wrong with them right they believe this and then there's this there's this massive lack of education and lack of reading

yeah they're not interested in understanding how they know that the earth is round or how they know that every other planet in the solar system is round right or how they know that every other planet that we've observed all the stars are round why they're round right why it's a matter of mass and gravity and all these they don't care about all that but what they don't want to think is the government as if it's the government is like one cabal that's what it is of equally minded people that are all working together to fuck you over somehow by convincing you that the earth is round yeah it is one of the dumbest things but it's also a sign that we've created this world that's really easy to survive

in we've nerfed all the hard edges and we keep the wolves off the streets. And then so these fucking dum-dums, and then they get online with computers, which is hilarious. So these idiots- I did research. When you looked at a website, that's not research, man. YouTube videos. I mean, it's kind of stunning. Yeah. Well, I think your point about actually we've made the world so safe because, yeah, there's a certain way like in Hunter Gatherer, those people would be food. Those are the people who are standing there looking at the tiger being like, that's not

a tiger. Yeah, that's not a tiger, man. Exactly. And then orange. Yeah. So, and it's, right. But what's weird about that, so that is like the er example. Like that is the dumbest shit you could possibly imagine. So, but- Oh, there's dumber. Oh, God, please. There's, right. But what's weird about that, so that is like the er exam. Like that is the dumbest shit you could possibly imagine.

Oh, there's dumber. Oh, God, please. There's people who think there's aliens underneath the earth and there's tunnels and just reptilians. And there's a secret cabal of kid fuckers that run the world. You made a really excellent point just a minute ago, right? Which is because like the philosopher Karl Popper once said, if there was a conspiracy, it failed, right? The whole conspiracy thing is that like, oh yeah, everybody's in on it.

As if, like look, there are the powerful, there are the, you know, there's elites who control, you know, but they have their own agendas. They're beating the, and it's the whole history of the world. They're going after each other left and right. It's about finances. Right, right.

And the idea that like, oh, somebody's going to be able to keep this amazing secret, right, you know, about the Earth is flat. And never, I mean, you know, it just, it gives people way more credit than, you know, than they deserve. Well, you would have to have everybody on the same page. All the different governments. Yeah.

All over the world. They're all like, yeah, yeah, yeah, lie about the Earth. Like, where's the benefit in lying about the shape of the planet? Yeah, right, right. To hold you down, man. Who's making money? But, you know, here's what's really messed up

is that, like, you know, climate change denial is just like a slightly less wackadoodle version of that, right? Because, you know, there's a guy, writer, philosopher, I forgot his name, Morton, I forgot his first name,

but he talks about climate change being a hyper-object. Like, you know, that modern world, we have things that are hyper-objects, which means they're just so big. Right. That we just – we have a hard time wrapping our minds around them. And that hyper-objects, you know, if we're going to evolve, right, we're going to evolve new behaviors. One of them is the capacity to deal with hyper-objects. But people want everything to be simple, you know.

I mean, which cracks me up because, like, they're fine with this being complex you know their cell phone can be complex because i like to use it but like you know the idea that like you know uh the climate could change climate change they they need it it freaks them out because it's too complicated or something so they go for the simple answer which is that you know it's a it's a conspiracy it's a hoax the i love this one the scientists are all doing it for the money. As if my pay was that good that, you know, I mean. I think a big issue happened with Al Gore. When Al Gore came out with an inconvenient truth, everybody connected Al Gore with the left. He's a Democrat.

And then they found out that he flies private jets. And they're like, this motherfucker. And so they're like, this is all bullshit. And so there was enough holes where they started poking through and then looking for conspiracies and then looking to deny the whole thing. I totally agree. I really wish, you know, I got nothing against Al Gore, but I wish he didn't become the face of climate change. Because it just pushed, I mean, if only Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sagan was still alive or, you know, had done it, it would have been a totally different thing. Because it wouldn't have had this.

Well, he's profited off of it in an extreme way yeah i don't i mean i don't know i don't know but but you know pull up this article al gore may be the first um climate change billionaire or green billionaire that he's he's made so much money doing these seminars and speeches and the film itself and then they're doing and then people the film. Right. And then people, I think it actually came out. It didn't do that well. The sequel came out already? I think so. I thought I saw, I don't know.

Al Gore could be the world's first carbon billionaire. Former vice president become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies. Well, no, that's okay. That part's okay. Right. Because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money, which like already solar employs more people now than coal does. That's okay. Right. Because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money, which like already, solar employs more people now

than coal does. That's amazing. Wow, coal. Well, that was one of the dumbest things when Trump became president. They're going to bring back coal. Like, what?

How about bring back knocking rocks together to start fires? No, it's like, it's as if coal, it's as if the typewriter companies got together and made sure

you never bought a computer. Like we're going to make computers illegal because you got to keep using typewriters. Coal's fucking terrible. It's terrible across the board. Oh man, you don't need it anymore. It's like, you know, it's just, but listen, I got to, one thing that you always got to acknowledge is that like this, you know, when you change infrastructures, people are going

to get hurt. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, for those coal miners, man, that's what they've done their whole life. It's been an honorable fucking thing. And they've they've you know so you can't just sort of be like hey we're switching infrastructure see ya yeah you know there's got to be some deep understanding of of of navigating of consequences and helping people who are going to be yeah you know put you know train them how to put up soul you know solar panels how do you feel about universal basic income have you ever looked oh yeah yeah no no I've thought about that a lot. It's a big thought in consideration

when it comes to automation and technology. You know, with the automation thing, it's so true, right? Because when you think about what's been going on with the last election and everybody was like, oh, what's happening with blue-collar people, workers, which is totally true.

But man, it's not China. It's automation, right? And that's what really is going to screw up the whole nature of work for everybody, from truck drivers, even to me, to university professors. We got this, the AI, the automation coming on. And right, what do you do? What do you do when there's no more work? Being a university professor is one day going to be retro, that kids are going to want to learn online. going to be retro, that kids are going to want to learn online, they're going to want to learn through some sort of an interactive course that you can get on your phone rather

than go to an actual physical place? It's possible, you know? I mean, it's possible, but I think, and this is going to be the whole question with the new economy or whatever, whatever happens, whatever we're moving into, is finding those places where, you know what? I don't want a machine. Right. You know what I mean?

So right now, like, so when the, what is it? The MOOCs came out, the massively online courses, you know, that was like five years ago. Everyone's like, that's it. Universities are done. Everybody's going to take these online courses. It never happened, you know, because people want to be together. They want to learn. They want the experience of having, you know, my part of my students, it's not just lecturing. I'm a great lecturer. My students are probably like, I bet you are, man. You're a good talker. I had one student say, you know, the, the, the reviews you get at the end, the guy said, hey, I hate to say this, but you know, you should make those

tapes for people to go to sleep because every class your voice put me to sleep. And he meant it in a nice way. He's like, you have a nice voice, you know. That's passive aggressive for sure. Little fuck, whoever he is. I think that I think people will always, with education,

there'll be some component of it that yeah sure you can learn it online why don't you but i think like you know we're gonna have to they'll they'll be there'll be a place for like people coming in and like learning in groups and having somebody who like has you know spent their whole life studying the thing telling you you know what's going on right like there's a lot of things we're like and we've lost a lot of this um uh mentorship right or apprenticeship right there's a lot of things we're like and we've lost a lot of this um Mentorship or apprenticeship mm-hmm, right? There's a lot of things you needed somebody who know you know who spent their whole life going Oh, you know you crank it this way not that way cuz you can't get that way

I'll never work you know right you can't learn that from watching a video or something yeah Well, there's certain things Martial arts which is a big part of my life you have to learn from a person you gotta have Tiny things that they must show you while you're doing it but you can learn a lot of things from videos um no no no doubt yeah there's a lot of things that people are putting up online instructional courses and stuff and i use some of them you know if i have to fix my sink i'm like okay oh for sure man yeah it's kind of amazing you know yeah so you know i think like with. So let's circle back to the UBI. You know, like with everything, we're going to have to invent new ways.

We will because we're just human beings. Like there's a way in which we're going to find, you know, niche places that there will be economies where people make things. But yeah, in the end, I mean, UBI may be necessary. I think it may really be necessary because if there's no work, you know, I mean, that's a recipe for disaster, you know, for your democratic society. Yeah, I just hope we can move past this idea that everybody who needs that is some sort of a welfare brat. Yeah, right, right. Well, you know, once there's no work at all, you know, I mean, they're good. Because like, you know, this is the thing, like with self-driving cars, right? So I ask this question a lot and I've written about this. Sort of like, okay, everyone's like, we got to with self-driving cars. I ask this question a lot and I've written about this.

Sort of like, okay, everyone's like, we've got to have self-driving cars. We're heading towards self-driving cars. Self-driving cars will destroy the last good blue-collar job in America, truck driving. That's a really good livelihood for a lot of people. And it's like, oh, we're just going to eliminate it. It's like, why? Do we have to? Like, okay, yeah, you're telling me there's going to be.

Well, for safety's sake. That's what they say, right? But until it's have to like, okay, yeah, there's, you're telling me there's going to be safety safe. That's what they say. Right. But until it's not entirely clear, right. You know, that, that,

that will work. And I, you know, what are the, for the, for the lives that are lost in the driving? I mean, you know,

the car crashes, is that going to be worth the social upheaval that comes from not having any work anymore? So, I mean, just like there are these huge issues bearing down on us. Yes, if it's your friend or your mom or your loved ones. Yeah, but these are the kind of calculus, I mean, if it tears down,

if wiping out these jobs destroys democracy, right? And you end up with fascism. That seems silly though, that doesn't seem possible. I just think that what it's gonna do is gonna make travel safer. And then we have to figure out, well, these jobs that people got from traveling, how do we replace that income? Yeah, right. Well, one of the things is we're going to have to start teaching kids to be creative. Yeah.

That's the niche stuff. I think there's going to be places where like now you'll have – so listen, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have – No, I know you're not. You're just being – you're just looking at all the variables. Yeah, and I'm asking like the, you know, we're moving so rapidly into this new world, right? That like, who's deciding for us? Who's deciding that we want cars? You know, I mean, we're told that we're going to get it.

But like a lot of these things, I think they're, you know, there needs to be a little bit more dialogue. It's a democracy, right? Instead of having this stuff shoved down our throats and told like, it's the best thing ever. You know, I mean. Well, you know, how about cell towers? They're fucking everywhere. I mean, there's no getting away from it. Right.

If you could. I mean, is there a community anywhere that has made some sort of an agreement? Will there be no cell towers in our community? Yeah. No, but there are communities that have decided to like in the Southwest that no lights, no lights at night. That's amazing. Yeah, because they wanted to preserve their night sky. We should really have some sort of a day where everybody shuts everything off.

And sees the sky, right? And see how crazy it is that we live in this weird state where we're on an organic spaceship flying through infinity. Yeah, yeah. And we don't see that, right? No. You know, when you do backpacking or something, you're in the backcountry, you know, a couple days, you notice things changing, like, oh, the moon's not as quiet as you know. And so nobody looks up now anymore, right?

Because there's nothing to see. You don't see anything because of light pollution. I went to the Keck Observatory on the Big Island. Oh, man. Have you been? I've never been. I'm a theorist. I don't, you know, nobody's going to get me close to a telescope.

I'll break it. Dude, the fucking, just, you don't even have to go all the way to the observatory, the visitor station, which is, I forget where it's at. I think it's- 14 or 12 or something. Something like that. It's really high. Right.

But they have diffused lighting all over the big island, so there's no light pollution. And when you look up, it is just stunning. Right. You look up, you're like, wow. The Milky Way, right? And most people have never seen the Milky Way, right? It's right there. Right. I thought you have to have a telescope to Milky Way, right? It's right there. Right.

Like I thought you have to have a telescope to see all, no, it's right there. Right there. And you feel like you're flying through space. Yeah. And you have this really humble feeling that I think people get in a couple of different places. People get when they live next to mountains.

They get it when they live next to the ocean. But you really get it if you could see space. And I think one of the things that is haunting the human race is the arrogance of humans, which is compounded by the fact that we can't see the cosmos, that we only see what's in front of us. So this is the world that we live in. We put a roof over our head. This is the box.

I got my blinders on. I'm moving ahead because I want a new Lexus or whatever, you know, whatever it is, whatever material thing you're trying to possess. When this unstoppable force in front of, when you look up and you see the cosmos, it's like it's an undeniable reality. Right. And you go, oh, okay, okay, this is just a small thing. My existence is just a small thing in this mystery, this giant mystery of, you know, we just found out 20 years ago, this planet's out. Right. I mean, this is a giant mystery. Right. You're looking up at a hundred billion stars

in this galaxy alone. Man, I couldn't, you're speaking my language. I mean, you know, the loss and the capital M word, right? So I'm a scientist, I'm an atheist, but I believe in mystery. I believe that kind of at the core of our lives is just, I wake up every day and I'm freaking here and I'm not going to, I'm going to be here until I die. And then I have no idea what the hell happens. Right. So, you know, and the, as you said, like mountain mountains in particular, you know, I have a thing for mountains.

Um, but the, the night sky is it's, it reminds you, it opens that space up, right. You know, where you're sort of like, you know, and you're right. You can, you know, we can talk about it or you can talk about it, but it's really, it's an experience. It's the experience that just shows you you're right. You can, you know, we can talk about it. We can talk about it, but it's really, it's an experience. It's the experience that just shows you, you're part of this. It's more than you, but you're here. And, you know, and I think, right, a lot of the stupidity of the modern age, you know, as you said, the consumerism, particularly, like all that matters to me is getting my

next pile of shit. When you're out there, you realize who cares, you know, who freaking cares? Like, you know, for a moment, even you just get the sense of that mystery and it can be transformative. You know, I think what's happening is we've created these civilizations. The civilizations need to be lit up. The lights keep us from seeing the universe. The universe humbles us. So we're not humbled. Then we move towards acquiring physical possessions, material objects, because we think that that's going to make us happy. And our entire society is geared towards innovation because everybody wants the newest,

shiniest shit. And that is, that is what's leading us to artificial life. And that all this shiny shit is all innovation. And it's eventually going to move to this one singularity. And that singularity is some new being yeah so it's funny like because you know one thing when i i think about like uh you know all these other so you know my my argument all these other civilizations is that you know the whether or not you make it maybe that the evolutionary heritage you get right so we you know evolve from you know both chimpanzees or you know the chimpanzee ancestor and the bonobo ancestor so we've got like we fight we're higher art we're very hierarchical right um ancestor. So we've got like, we fight, we're very hierarchical, right?

So, you know, we've got a lot of aggression in this, but we also got the bonobo kind of like, let's just have sex. Everything's cool. So we're like, we're sort of, we've got this really weird mixed evolutionary baggage and whether or not you can make it to the next side with the existential challenge of triggering climate change is kind of like, A, what your evolution, what evolution gave you, you know, cause you can imagine species like hive minds you know if you came from termite an intelligent termite species it might be a lot easier to deal with climate change you're like everybody you know get on the you know uh get on the get on the the course um but uh the most essentially is can you evolve new behaviors right so we've been on this track and it's leading us in a way that as you said you were it's like

the the shiny thing dangling in front of us is leading us off on this one track. And the question is, can we evolve new behaviors? Which I actually am going to say this. I think they're part of it is spiritual, you know, or at least in my atheist way of like reconnecting with mystery to see like, you know, we're part of this and we need to respect it. And, you know, what do you when you say spiritual, what do you mean? So my first book was about science and religion. You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm not a Richard Dawkins atheist. I think that whole idea is a difference. Well, you know, Richard Dawkins is what I would call a strident atheist. And he's like, you know, anybody who has any

spiritual or any, you know, any inclination towards mystery is an idiot, you know? And like Richard Dawkins needs to do LSD. Right. In a certain way, right? Or DMT or psilocybin or something that just gives you an undeniable experience of mystery. Right, exactly. So I've been doing Zen meditation for like the last 30 years. So I've been staring at a wall for 30 years and the first thing you learn is it's really boring.

And then the second thing you learn is that there's stuff under your thoughts. You are not just the shit you're thinking. There's just sort of you settle down and there's just like this openness, you know. And so the spiritual part, it's like you said, you know, when you're in the mountains, right? So I love doing backcountry hiking. And when you get above treeline, there's that weird thing that happens when you're above treeline. And you're just like, you know, you got this panorama around you.

And that thing is, you know, the earth, earth right of which we are part and you know so this is an interesting question about like can virtual reality do this or do you actually need to get out there i kind of think you need to get out there but maybe virtual reality can give people the impetus to get out there you know well it'll be a different experience i don't think there's anything wrong with the virtual reality experience of being in the mountains i think it'd probably be pretty fucking cool but it's not going to be being in the mountains right something about being in the mountains is also there's a there's a weird feeling and i don't know if it's real but there's a weird feeling that there's no signal out there because in the places where there's no cell signal there's no there's a

feeling you get when you're absolutely not connected yeah and then you see wildlife and the wildlife out there they're almost like these mystical beings. Like when you see a deer step out of the tree line and it's like that. Catch its eye. Yeah. That thing has been that way for a million years. Yeah. That species has not changed at all in a million years.

Yeah. And the signal, what you're talking about, the signal, it's really the thing is what for me, it's like when I get far enough back that I know there's just not another human being here. Right. You know? Yeah. And this is like is like when i leave this exact is this is going to still be happening like it just doesn't give a shit about you right and it's just moving along and as you said it's been moving this way for millions of years and you just realize like and that's why you know part of the thing i'm saying with the book is that like look if we trigger climate change that's just the earth's way of like creating the next set. You know, it used us to create climate change to, you know, now move on to something else.

Because that's what the Earth does. It's just this animate power, you know. And when you're out there, you feel that. And the thing that I think we need to do is sort of reestablish our connection to that. We're part of that. We're from that. We're not evil. We're not bad.

We need to reintegrate ourselves in a way that we still get our civilization. But, you know, that's what I mean. So, yes, why spiritual? Because when we connect to that mystery, then we're in a better place to make the right decisions, to understand what the decisions are. If not, we're like, oh, we got to save the polar bears. And we're not looking at. No, no. It's the biosphere as a whole that we have to understand. Well, operating out of ego and ideology and not out of rational thought with all the information at our disposal and really

verifying that information, understanding what's correct and what's not correct and whether or not there's bias behind it or scientific research that was funded by people that have a vested interest in it leaning one way or the other. All that stuff is very, very slippery and very dangerous. And when you find out that studies have been influenced by special interest groups or lobbyists or whatever, especially pharmaceutical studies are the creepiest. They can do a series of studies, and only one of them shows some sort of a positive impact for whatever weird reason, and that's the one they use.

And they don't have to publish the fact that they ran a hundred fucking studies. Right, right, right. Well, no, I try and teach people. I'm sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. I think the most important thing that people need to understand about science is not so much science's results, but how science works. Because it does work, right?

That's why we have all this stuff. And so they can distinguish. So I say that science is three things. It's spitballs, super tankers, and stadiums, right? The problem with the news, it'll be like, the latest study shows the color red will make you have better sex. It's like, what are you talking about? The latest study that can get you to click on that USA Today article. Yeah, right.

Exactly. The media reports it as if this was science. Like every day, a whole bunch of new articles come out. I write scientific articles. That's the currency of my profession. But like one study is just like it's a spitball, right? It's like basically we're shooting spitballs at each other. But science is like a supertanker, right?

You know, we're like it takes seven miles to turn a supertanker around. That's what really science is. The things that we think we deeply understand in science is like this supertanker. And people are shooting spitballs at the papers every day. And if you get enough spitballs on one side of the, you know, the prow or whatever, it starts to turn it right. So the science will turn slowly if enough of the spitballs are lined up. So people, you know, it's not about the single study. It's about, have there been 300 studies over the last 30 years that say the same thing? So like, you know, the coffee stuff, coffee's good, coffee's bad. Clearly the fact that we keep getting thing. So like the coffee stuff, coffee's good, coffee's bad.

Clearly the fact that we keep getting both answers means we don't know. That's all. We don't know yet. It's just not clear. Climate change, 30, not even 30 years, 100 years of the same results. Yeah, we got that. Well, there's always a problem with diet in that you're not taking into account how nutrients interact with other foods or different foods interact with foods. When you say coffee's bad, okay, was it bad when you're smoking cigarettes or bad when

you're eating grass-fed meat or bad when you're on a vegan diet? When is it bad? Right. Who are these people and what are they putting in their system and how much sugar are they taking in and how much sodium and what's the nutrient levels of their blood? Did you test them for B12 deficiencies and all these different things? That's the real problem with any dietary studies. They don't take into account the extremely varied diet of human beings.

And the complexity of the system, right? Yes. So I would tell people that when it comes to health sciences, anything in general about human beings, look, this stuff is really complex. And as you said, there's a thousand different things that can interact. So you've got to really take that stuff with a grain of salt. Like, okay, does smoking cause cancer? Yeah, got that. But like, yeah, is coffee good or bad? We just, the studies aren't there yet, but that's different from climate change or gravity or is the earth round? Yeah. Yeah. Those are stupid. So listen, man, thank you very much for being here. I really

appreciate it it was really good to talk to you it was fun do you have an audio book out? yeah there is an audio book did you read it? I have not did I read the

did you read the words that are in the audio book version? did you were you narrating it? no you weren't? no I didn't god damn it

I'm sorry why did they do that? I don't know they never asked me you're really good at talking what the fuck man I hate that I hate that when I buy audio books. They never ask me. But you're really good at talking. What the fuck, man? Dude, I hate that. I could have been really animated. I hate that.

When I buy audio books and I know that the guy who's reading it doesn't have a fucking single bone invested in this idea that he's saying. He's just repeating the words. Well, the guy, I'm sure whoever did it was totally channeling. I must have felt it in the astral plane. It would be better if you read it, man. They should have let you do it. Yeah, I don do it yeah why the fuck didn't they let you do it i don't know i just don't push for it uh no i didn't even know you know that part of the you

know i didn't i didn't understand part of publishing tell people the title again uh light of the stars alien worlds and the fate of the earth your twitter is uh adam frank four why four because that's the only one. Everything else was taken. So I was just like, oh, I got to come up with it. Oh, OK. Six years ago when I got on. Adam Frank 4.

And do you have an Instagram as well? No. No? I have a Facebook author page. And website? Website is Adam Frank Science, I think. If you just Google Adam Frank, it'll pop up. Thank you, Adam.

I really appreciate it. It was so much fun, man. It was really a lot of fun. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.